tornado examiner
Member
the fact that a 30 meter wide vortex can form, rip a house to shreds and then dissipate within a few seconds leaving the trees 50 meters from the house with their leaves intact shows that using contextual damage to rate tornadoes at all is not very fair. that stuff happens. the wind boundries in tornadoes can be very sharp. 80 mph with 200 mph winds 20 feet away. unless your dealing with a consolidated wedge producing noticeable debarking and ground scouring without any randomness to the structure damage level not based on construction quality. than contextual damage needs to be thrown out of the window for the most part. this is why ground video and radar analysis should be used in rating tornadoes whenever possible. if the mayfield tornado showed a multivortex structure as it hit mayfield. im pretty sure that would explain the damage inconsistencies. but of course there are no good videos of it as it went through there. and radar is useless because its not fine scale enough for that scenerio.