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Severe Weather 2025

Aaron Rider said:
excrement box? Come on, man. I get what you are trying to say but I highly doubt the hardy pioneers of early South Dakota had the capacity to build to withstand a significant tornado.

That house, however, stood many a violent thunderstorm, blizzard, hail storm, derecho, and God knows what else the prairie can devise in its century and more. I doubt those who lost it would appreciate this post.
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This is actually a really good point. I try and remember those “dots” on The DAT or “slabs” were actually people’s homes. Like it’s easy to forget that when analyzing the damage photos.

I also wince when I read people use terms like “pi$$ poor construction” or “typical southern constructed home”. I see that a lot in the wx community when events impact Alabama, KY,
or Tennessee. Not everyone can afford a perfectly anchored, and built way above code home. 99.99% of people when buying a home aren’t thinking “well gee, let’s make sure if a tornado hits this it’ll get a 5”. They are looking at what they can buy/build economically and what suits their needs best. Not what will get a thumbs up from some hobbyists online or a Tim Marshall type figure.

Edit: just want to make clear I’m not attacking Tim Marshall over his ratings. I’m referencing when he posted pictures of the homes damaged in the 3/14 Arkansas outbreak with some pretty tasteless commentary.
 
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Grand Poo Bah said:
Hey, there's some really good stuff in there! And it's especially crazy it was started in 2017. A lot of the comments were way ahead of their time. I remember being so frustrated with the EF scale and the lack of any discussion about it I just started randomly googling my feelings like "EF scale useless", "EF scale broken", "tornadoes underrated", etc. trying to find ANYTHING that verified what I was feeling. That's how I found this forum. Can't remember the exact search that brought it up, but finding the EF thread was beyond refreshing. I found a whole group of people who shared my frustrations and understood the nature of the problem so much deeper than I did. Then I came in guns blazing with all sorts of scorching hot takes and unpopular opinions lmao.

Took some time, lots of fact checking by other users, and some very heated arguments before I finally acclimated to this place. I feel like that's kind of the initiation a lot of people go through here. You have to have a certain level of passion to seek out and find this place, and it's usually boiling over due to the previous lack of an outlet for it, so confrontations happen until the user either finally sees reason or leaves. All other forums just ban those users and move on, but this forum molds them into respectable and knowledgeable weather enthusiasts.
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It seems the common consensus is Golsby, Chickasha, and Vilonia are the top 3 obvious snubs. Are there any since 2014 that also stick out to you?
 
ColdFront said:
This is actually a really good point. I try and remember those “dots” on The DAT or “slabs” were actually people’s homes. Like it’s easy to forget that when analyzing the damage photos.

I also wince when I read people use terms like “pi$$ poor construction” or “typical southern constructed home”. I see that a lot in the wx community when events impact Alabama, KY,
or Tennessee. Not everyone can afford a perfectly anchored, and built way above code home. 99.99% of people when buying a home aren’t thinking “well gee, let’s make sure if a tornado hits this it’ll get a 5”. They are looking at what they can buy/build economically and what suits their needs best. Not what will get a thumbs up from some hobbyists online or a Tim Marshall type figure.

Edit: just want to make clear I’m not attacking Tim Marshall over his ratings. I’m referencing when he posted pictures of the homes damaged in the 3/14 Arkansas outbreak with some pretty tasteless commentary.
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I came to a pretty similar conclusion a couple of days ago as well. What’s the point of building something up to the point that it’ll get an ef5 rating? An ef5-level constructed home is still a total loss in an ef4 tornado, so why bother?
 
slenker said:
@buckeye05 I will back off on my statements I made earlier about this thing potentially being EF5 for sure. I got caught up in the actual physical appearance of the tornado itself (I still think it had an EF4+ “look” physically) but I’m a little confused about what you said in the cycloidal markings image. That certainly looks more impressive than typical crop scouring to me, due to the excessive browning surrounding the beaten vegetation, with the cycloidal marks in the center of the browning. It also certainly looks like at least some of the trees are debarked in that first image (although I cannot tell, it’s too far up to see fully) and the ground immediately in the vicinity of the road that isn’t the crops, aka some of the grass, does actually look to be, at the very least, lightly scoured. To me that’s certainly much more impressive than the EF2 that hit the dominator, there’s barely any browning near the cyloidal marks in that instance. What am I not seeing here?

EDIT: I want to be clear as well, I never claimed that it would be unreasonable if this thing didn’t achieve an EF4+ rating, I just said I fully believed that if it achieved an EF3 rating it would be an underestimate whether it was a reasonable survey or not. Also, this is the image I’m referring to:
View attachment 44706
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This is not high-end scouring, period. The issue here is that you’re misconstruing what this photo really shows, and it’s significance. The discoloration is not what matters here, or in general. The brown color is from loose tilled dirt being kicked up by the tornado and plastered against surrounding crops. Farm field soil is generally loose, and is not compacted underneath a dense layer of surface vegetation, such as grass. As a result, it doesn’t take much to make it go airborne and cause a streak of discoloration. What matters is the actual removal of surface vegetation, and there’s very little of that here. The worst damage is actually represented by the light green patches where the crops are flattened, but not fully scoured from the earth. There’s nothing here that could be called grass scouring either. This is comparable to crop damage produced by your average EF2 or EF3.

The Dominator scouring is indeed more impressive. Why? More removal of surface vegetation. There’s actually bare soil showing in several areas. There’s no bare soil showing in the Gary scouring.

Been doing this long enough to discern what significant scouring looks like, and in general, crops are not something that need a super violent tornado to be scoured (and “but Plainfield tho” is not a valid rebuttal to that, though I don’t want to open that can of worms). In general, grass scouring is the only kind that is automatically significant.
 
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