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Enhanced Fujita Ratings Debate Thread

You summed it up perfectly.

Year after year, waiting for the streak to break. Candidate after candidate, coming close, but no cigar. Theory after theory, about how the next EF5 would hit the Jackson CWA or a big city or wherever.

And then, suddenly, Grand Forks releases a statement, and the longest streak between two 5s is suddenly over.

Like, we expected the next EF5 to crash through Oklahoma City or Jackson, and be the costliest tornado ever, and then there was a rural tornado that just so happened to strike a train at peak intensity and the 12 year streak literally just ended. If that doesn't prove how nature is random, I don't know what does.
Everyone on this site was so verbally angry when Mayfield and other tornadoes from that day were shafted of the rating they should have gotten.
And the near universal backlash across the entirety of social media is likely part of what caused this new “precedent” to happen.
What bluntly pointed out how flawed our methods for accessing tornado intensity are.
We were all there, and it was a mess.
 
I'm still working on my list of EF4-EF5 tornadoes during the drought, and I'm sort of on the fence about whether Mount Juliet (Nashville) 2020 should have been rated EF4. This damage to one of the elementary schools has an expected value of 176 mph, but there's no explanation for why they went with the lower bound 150 mph estimate in the DAT, NCDC report, or the main NWS website, so I can't really tell if that's warranted or not. If anyone has any more information, please let me know.

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But I have to say, the Carroll County tornado has to be the winner of the "underrated tornado of the outbreak" award. This house was rated 125 mph EF2 (another case of surveyors actually going outside the bounds of the EF scale itself to lowball a rating). I honestly have to wonder how much of that has to do with the fact that the tornado was unwarned.
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"...nor have there been as many casualties anywhere remotely close to the storms over a decade ago."
Is that a result of better warnings or weaker storms? I can't check right now if years in the early 2010s (excluding 2011, obviously) were deadlier than nowadays but it's probably only a marginal decrease.
I know I'm digging up an old comment here, but I also have to add that even though the number of deadly tornadoes has gone down, the numbers of casualties in tornadoes that have been deadly has stayed pretty much exactly the same. In fact, the number of tornado-related deaths seems to have increased since the second half of the 2010s. Both Mayfield and London would make the top 10 deadliest tornadoes of the 2010s. Mayfield was the fourth-deadliest tornado in the US in the past 60 years, with all of the top 3 being in 2011.

But yeah, to answer the question, the deadliest tornadoes by year over the past 15 years are:

2010 - Yazoo City, MS - 10 deaths
2011 - Joplin, MO - 158 deaths
2012 - Henryville, IN - 11 deaths
2013 - Moore, OK - 24 deaths
2014 - Vilonia, AR - 16 deaths
2015 - Rowlett, TX - 10 deaths
2016 - Funing, China - 98 deaths
2016 - Rosalie, AL - 4 deaths (deadliest in US)
2017 - Adel, GA - 11 deaths
2018 - Baltimore, MD - 2 deaths
2019 - Bharbalia, Nepal - >28 deaths
2019 - Beauregard, AL - 23 deaths (deadliest in US)
2020 - Cookeville, TN - 19 deaths
2021 - Mayfield, KY - 58 deaths
2022 - Winterset, IA - 6 deaths
2023 - Rolling Fork, MS - 17 deaths
2024 - Fort Pierce, FL - 6 deaths
 
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