Significant Tornado Events

[locomusic01]

It's not often you hear about September outbreaks....I know September 1894 had a long-track family in Wisconsin and Iowa and produced 63 fatalities, didn't know about a 1924 outbreak in that area. I'd like to find out more information about September 1928 and the September 1951 Great Lakes outbreak too.

Exceeded my photo limit lol. I think I've already posted what I had from September 1928 earlier (mostly the Pender, NE and Davis, SD F4s + I think a couple of pictures from the Rockford, IL F4). The September 1951 event mostly just consists of the extremely intense Waupaca, WI F4+ and the likely underrated Cambria, WI F3.

I need to write a bit about them at some point, but in the meantime here's some stuff from the Cambria F3. The first few are from the site of the tornado's only fatality:

I don't have hardly anything from the Waupaca F4+. One of like a thousand events I'd really like to dig deeper into someday:

The 11/11/1911 "Great Blue Norther" outbreak is also really interesting to me, headlined by the Janesville-Milton, WI F4 that killed at least 9 people:

 

[atrainguy]

Gotta question I was just randomly wondering - is there a record length for continuous "official" F5/EF5 damage? I do notice Hackleburg has a fairly lengthy stretch of EF5 damage, at least according to this map.

 

[Ivanthetornadoenthusiast]

I'm surprised that not a lot of us in here talked about the June 15, 1992 Kansas outbreak

 

[Lake Martin EF4]

I didn't think there was any footage of this tornado due to its apparent rain-wrapped nature; I've also searched previously and didn't find anything, but that was BEFORE I added some YouTube filters to uBlock Origin. Low and behold, I found this today; points for the incredible commentary:

Hmmmm....if you found that using uBlock, why don't you see if you can find footage of the St. Johns, KS EF3 of April 14, 2012?

 

[A Guy]

Gotta question I was just randomly wondering - is there a record length for continuous "official" F5/EF5 damage? I do notice Hackleburg has a fairly lengthy stretch of EF5 damage, at least according to this map.

I would be very, very surprised if it wasn't Hackleburg. It is the longest tracked official F/EF5 except for Candlestick Park which was a family, and it produced EF5 damage in a large number of locations. It's clearly one of the most exceptional tornadoes recorded.

How meaningful the 'longest swath' or largest area is, is a different issue.
Firstly, there needs to be structures to hit to get the rating - something that's a mite difficult for anything over EF3 at the moment. Secondly, damage is plotted out by points and then someone connects around them to define the contours. This obviously involves some artistic licence - there are plenty of EF4 and EF3 damage points amongst the EF5 ones for example

I think it's instructive to compare the smooth contours of most maps with what Fujita produced at Xenia. His map is clearly the work of someone using a concept of damage intensity mapping that was different and much more pedantic:



In talking about mapping contentions, the biggest probably lie at the opposite end of the scale - the surveying of the EF0 contour. I have a paper somewhere on the rather loose relationship between the surveyed width and that detected by satellite. There seems to be a lot of variation with how liberal surveyors are, which leads to some interesting outcomes. For example, the widest of the Pilger family wedges was surveyed at 530 yards, while the Dalton tornado, a classic Northern Plains needle, is surveyed at 650 yards.

 

[pohnpei]

Gotta question I was just randomly wondering - is there a record length for continuous "official" F5/EF5 damage? I do notice Hackleburg has a fairly lengthy stretch of EF5 damage, at least according to this map.

View attachment 17373

Rating wise, it's unthinkable that Hackleburg could had long EF5 rating stretch if it occurred in recent years cause we all know how hard it is to get even one single EF5 rating point nowadays and the fact that most houses it encountered wasn't extremely well built.

Intensity wise, I think tornadotalk did a good job on this and they had a 28miles near continues EF5 stretch from Hackleburg to Mt hope and this was probably the longest near continues EF5 stretch for tornados in modern days. (Intensity wise)

Overview of the Hackleburg-Harvest-Huntland AL-TN Tornadoes of April 27, 2011 – Tornado Talk

www.tornadotalk.com

 

[Juliett Bravo Kilo]

Rating wise, it's unthinkable that Hackleburg could had long EF5 rating stretch if it occurred in recent years cause we all know how hard it is to get even one single EF5 rating point nowadays and the fact that most houses it encountered wasn't extremely well built.

Intensity wise, I think tornadotalk did a good job on this and they had a 28miles near continues EF5 stretch from Hackleburg to Mt hope and this was probably the longest near continues EF5 stretch for tornados in modern days. (Intensity wise)
View attachment 17375

Overview of the Hackleburg-Harvest-Huntland AL-TN Tornadoes of April 27, 2011 – Tornado Talk

www.tornadotalk.com

I know that the EF5 stretch for Hackleburg was longer than the EF5 swaths of all the other EF5 tornadoes on 4/27/11. It maintained peak intensity for an exceptionally long time.

 

[Ivanthetornadoenthusiast]

A couple shots of the tornado taken by a traveling insurance agent west of Winnebago, southwest of the Homer area:

Where did you got those photos of that tornado ?

 

[locomusic01]

Where did you got those photos of that tornado ?

They're from the History Nebraska Digital Archives.

 

[tornado examiner]

Rating wise, it's unthinkable that Hackleburg could had long EF5 rating stretch if it occurred in recent years cause we all know how hard it is to get even one single EF5 rating point nowadays and the fact that most houses it encountered wasn't extremely well built.

Intensity wise, I think tornadotalk did a good job on this and they had a 28miles near continues EF5 stretch from Hackleburg to Mt hope and this was probably the longest near continues EF5 stretch for tornados in modern days. (Intensity wise)
View attachment 17375

Overview of the Hackleburg-Harvest-Huntland AL-TN Tornadoes of April 27, 2011 – Tornado Talk

www.tornadotalk.com

I really wish tornadotalk didn’t have such an unnecessary paywall

And the recent move to bloody patreon made it worse

 

[TH2002]

Hmmmm....if you found that using uBlock, why don't you see if you can find footage of the St. Johns, KS EF3 of April 14, 2012?

Haven't found any footage of the St. John EF3 yet, although I haven't had much time to look either. Perhaps there's something out there given it passed uncomfortably close to multiple towns along its path...
And speaking of uBlock, here's my tutorial if anyone is interested by chance: https://talkweather.com/threads/ubl...-those-obscure-tornado-videos.2074/post-84447

 

[locomusic01]

I really wish tornadotalk didn’t have such an unnecessary paywall

And the recent move to bloody patreon made it worse

It's always a bummer when information like that isn't freely accessible to all, but I can't begrudge people trying to make a little money for their hard work. I don't have any insight into TornadoTalk specifically, but just from my own stuff, I know it can take an incredible amount of time and effort - and often time and effort that could've otherwise gone toward actually earning a living.

Doing something because you love it and you're passionate about it is still rewarding, but it doesn't help pay the bills. I probably would've considered Patreon or something too if it weren't for the fact that I don't really get enough traffic to make it worthwhile lol

 

[locomusic01]

Haven't found any footage of the St. John EF3 yet, although I haven't had much time to look either. Perhaps there's something out there given it passed uncomfortably close to multiple towns along its path...
And speaking of uBlock, here's my tutorial if anyone is interested by chance: https://talkweather.com/threads/ubl...-those-obscure-tornado-videos.2074/post-84447

Haven't tried it yet, but this looks super useful - thanks! I hate Youtube's search function with the fire of a thousand suns and it's a shame that so much stuff gets buried under useless garbage.

 

[MNTornadoGuy]

It's always a bummer when information like that isn't freely accessible to all, but I can't begrudge people trying to make a little money for their hard work. I don't have any insight into TornadoTalk specifically, but just from my own stuff, I know it can take an incredible amount of time and effort - and often time and effort that could've otherwise gone toward actually earning a living.

Doing something because you love it and you're passionate about it is still rewarding, but it doesn't help pay the bills. I probably would've considered Patreon or something too if it weren't for the fact that I don't really get enough traffic to make it worthwhile lol

Sometimes they also have to pay quite a bit of money to obtain information for their articles too.

 

[locomusic01]

Sometimes they also have to pay quite a bit of money to obtain information for their articles too.

Yeah, among other costs I'm sure. Speaking of which, a couple of years ago I paid for a collection of 1920 Palm Sunday photos when I was thinking about writing an article on it. They turned out to be of poor quality and most either weren't all that interesting or were ones I already had (go figure), but it reminds me that I don't think I ever got around to posting them here. I don't have my scanner set up but I'll try to take some decent pictures later.

It often gets overshadowed by the 1965 outbreak (for obvious reasons) but it was a pretty high-end event in its own right.

 

[Tanner]

I really wish tornadotalk didn’t have such an unnecessary paywall

And the recent move to bloody patreon made it worse

It’s a service. If anyone understood truly how much effort it takes to write summaries, stagger information, ask for source approval, and do deep research, it would make sense to charge members; Jen Narramore and her team work incredibly hard. Anyways…off topic.

 

[Sawmaster]

Some of us simply can't afford paywalls At least I did get to real many of the articles I was interested in before I somehow became less worthy

 

[Ivanthetornadoenthusiast]

It's pretty interesting that today is the 68th anniversary of the unlisted tornadoes that hit Marianna, Arkansas with two unlisted killer tornadoes that hit Commerce Landing (MS) and Lewisburg (MS) with likely other unlisted tornadoes that hit Alabama (Maud, Barton, Mynot and Huntsville)

 

[tornado examiner]

The Palm Sunday 1965 tornado outbreak has always confused me……mostly because I don’t know how an outbreak structured like it could happen…

 

[CheeselandSkies]

The Palm Sunday 1965 tornado outbreak has always confused me……mostly because I don’t know how an outbreak structured like it could happen…

It's second only to the Super Outbreak of '74 as the event I wish we could go back and look at on present-day NEXRAD. I'd suspect it had to be something like 4/27/11 over MS/AL, with subtle forcing mechanisms out in the open warm sector and just the right (or wrong) amount of EML, to keep things from going up into a mess but yet allow multiple waves of tornadic supercells to fire and become sustained in a relatively concentrated area.