I posted the few that I have here: https://talkweather.com/threads/significant-tornado-events.1276/post-78154
Technically they found "3% EF4 Damage" which I simply can't wrap my head around. It's not like it takes an expert to look at damage photos from Joplin and rightfully conclude the tornado was an EF5.
www.google.com
I’m curious on how you were able to determine the path width and make such a detailed track with this tornado. Really amazing work by the way.So one of my long, long, long-term projects is to rework and significantly expand my old Tri-State Tornado article in time for the 100th anniversary. I've been doing a little bit of work on it here and there when the mood strikes, and I've made quite a bit of progress on my map:
March 18, 1925 — The Tri-State Tornado - Google My Maps
March 18, 1925 — The Tri-State Tornado
I still have a few other tornadoes to add and the KY tornadoes need a bit of tweaking, but the Tri-State itself (both track/direction and width) should be about as accurate as it's possible to be nearly a century after the fact. I also started marking the fatalities, but that's obviously going to be a ridiculously involved process and so far I've only finished Hamilton County, IL.
Anyway, the total length of the main tornado as I have it here is 220.5 miles if you measure straight from start to end or 222.1 miles if you follow the actual contours. It's possible this was indeed a single continuous path, but if the tornado did cycle, the most likely spot is north of Saco in Madison County, MO.
If we treat that gap as a true break, we end up with the Ellington-Annapolis, MO section being ~41 miles and the main Tri-State path being ~179. I feel reasonably confident saying the rest of the path is probably a single tornado. Conversely, the short sections before and after the main track are almost certainly separate tornadoes.
It's been talked about plenty of times before, but what's staggering about this tornado is not just that it had such a long path, but that it remained remarkably large and violent throughout virtually all of it. It reached ~1.2 mi wide near Biehle, MO and later maxed out at just under 1.5 mi wide near Dale, IL. Even more impressively, from about Cherokee Pass, MO to south of Wheeling, IN (a distance of ~169 mi) it appears its width never fell below half a mile. Obviously there were sections where the most intense damage swath was fairly narrow, but for the most part it was unusually wide. It probably first reached violent intensity northeast of Annapolis, MO and, aside from the section in Madison County that was too remote to really be documented, it more or less maintained it all the way to Princeton, IN and beyond. Interestingly, there are even reports of ground scouring in numerous places across all three states.
I also have the long-track F4 near the TN/KY border divided into two paths, each rated F4 (though either could potentially warrant an F5 IMO - especially the first). It definitely cycled quickly in the vicinity of Trammel Creek in far northwestern Macon County, TN. Multiple people reported seeing it lift and reform + there was heavy debris fallout but no actual damage there. The second tornado touched down just before crossing the KY border and causing devastation near Holland. It's possible it may've cycled again either north of Lamb or east of Mt. Hermon but I need to research it more. If it did then all three tornadoes probably deserve an F4 because there was high-end destruction in Beaumont near the very end of the path.
Haven't finished mapping it yet, but one of the members of the tornado family in central KY (Fayette County, up near Lexington) likely reached F4 intensity too, although Grazulis has the whole family as a single long-track F3. Even without the Tri-State Tornado, this would've been a pretty high-end event.
(Side note: I also thought it was mildly interesting that the Laconia F4 southwest of Louisville touched down in basically the exact spot where the Brandenburg F5 crossed the Ohio River.)
Thanks! It's based on a ton of sources - newspaper reports, books, info I'd gathered back when I wrote my article, the paper from Bob Johns et al, etc. For the width specifically, I tried to rely on actual damage points whenever possible and filled in the rest with first-hand accounts. Since a lot of those accounts were estimates (i.e. "the path was between half and three-quarters of a mile wide") I mostly used the lower figures.
Not especially related, but there were experts from NTP found that it takes over 100m/s winds for a tornado to lift a 8 ton combine in experiment. So I also have doubt about the high end EF3 winds to toss over 30 ton rail cars only based on rough estimation. The rail car damage in Earlington was rated EF2 with 120mph by NWS.It has been brought up in this thread before that the 2011 Tuscaloosa tornado likely reached EF5 intensity in the rural areas between Tuscaloosa and Birmingham, and one of the sites along the path that most interests me is the coalyard in the western suburbs of Birmingham where two rail cars were hurled from the tracks.
I found a research article that focuses on the damage that occurred there, with a couple diagrams showing the direction the empty coal cars were displaced. The railcars, which weighed about 35-36 tons (70,000-72,000 lbs) each, were displaced 60 m (about 196 feet) and 120 m (just shy of 400 feet), respectively.
It was of the author's opinion that the cars were more probably rolled rather than tossed, but I don't agree with this assessment - survivor accounts stated the railcars were carried through the air in a single toss, and we can also look at another tornado for comparison. The April 9, 2011 Pocahontas, IA EF4 destroyed a farmstead and rolled/bounced a combine several hundred feet in the process. Note the impact marks along the combine's track where it made ground contact several times during the tornado; similar impact marks are not to be seen in the Tuscaloosa railyard.
In all fairness, the author of the article didn't completely dismiss the idea that the railcars were tossed, either.
The article also includes a calculation which ascertains mid to high end EF3 winds may been enough to toss the railcars, though this seems very iffy to me as well - to be fair again, they do include a disclaimer that this is only a very rough estimate. I'm not sure if other engineers have weighed in on what kind of winds may have been necessary to toss the railcars.
Earlier along the path in the Holt-Peterson area northeast of Tuscaloosa the tornado destroyed a rail bridge, hurling a 37-ton (74,000 lb) truss 100 feet up a hill. I have heard that engineers (not sure who) ran a calculation on that bridge, and determined winds exceeding 200 mph would have been necessary for the tornado to destroy the bridge in that fashion.
Perhaps most interesting is the question mark in the first diagram, where it is speculated a third railcar may have been hurled by the tornado, possibly deposited in a deep ravine nearby or simply thrown far enough to never be seen again. However, according to NWS BMX no railcars were reported missing after the storm's passage, and it's likely there was simply no railcar in that spot to begin with.
Oh, and by the way, the paper analyzing the damage at the railyard can be found here - while I don't necessarily agree with everything it presents, it's still an interesting read.
Another thing about as to why the Tri-State impresses me is the temperature did not reach 70.0°F till the end of the track. From what I have heard temperatures ranged from like 60.0°F to 70.0°F and dewpoints ranged from like 55.0°F to 63.0°F. So the average temperature would have been like 65.0°F with a dewpoint of 59.0°F. The only thing I can think of a tornado possibly lasting over 200 miles with modest temps and dews, there would have to of been high CAPE, SRH, shear, and a powerful LLJ.So one of my long, long, long-term projects is to rework and significantly expand my old Tri-State Tornado article in time for the 100th anniversary. I've been doing a little bit of work on it here and there when the mood strikes, and I've made quite a bit of progress on my map:
March 18, 1925 — The Tri-State Tornado - Google My Maps
March 18, 1925 — The Tri-State Tornado
I still have a few other tornadoes to add and the KY tornadoes need a bit of tweaking, but the Tri-State itself (both track/direction and width) should be about as accurate as it's possible to be nearly a century after the fact. I also started marking the fatalities, but that's obviously going to be a ridiculously involved process and so far I've only finished Hamilton County, IL.
Anyway, the total length of the main tornado as I have it here is 220.5 miles if you measure straight from start to end or 222.1 miles if you follow the actual contours. It's possible this was indeed a single continuous path, but if the tornado did cycle, the most likely spot is north of Saco in Madison County, MO.
If we treat that gap as a true break, we end up with the Ellington-Annapolis, MO section being ~41 miles and the main Tri-State path being ~179. I feel reasonably confident saying the rest of the path is probably a single tornado. Conversely, the short sections before and after the main track are almost certainly separate tornadoes.
It's been talked about plenty of times before, but what's staggering about this tornado is not just that it had such a long path, but that it remained remarkably large and violent throughout virtually all of it. It reached ~1.2 mi wide near Biehle, MO and later maxed out at just under 1.5 mi wide near Dale, IL. Even more impressively, from about Cherokee Pass, MO to south of Wheeling, IN (a distance of ~169 mi) it appears its width never fell below half a mile. Obviously there were sections where the most intense damage swath was fairly narrow, but for the most part it was unusually wide. It probably first reached violent intensity northeast of Annapolis, MO and, aside from the section in Madison County that was too remote to really be documented, it more or less maintained it all the way to Princeton, IN and beyond. Interestingly, there are even reports of ground scouring in numerous places across all three states.
I also have the long-track F4 near the TN/KY border divided into two paths, each rated F4 (though either could potentially warrant an F5 IMO - especially the first). It definitely cycled quickly in the vicinity of Trammel Creek in far northwestern Macon County, TN. Multiple people reported seeing it lift and reform + there was heavy debris fallout but no actual damage there. The second tornado touched down just before crossing the KY border and causing devastation near Holland. It's possible it may've cycled again either north of Lamb or east of Mt. Hermon but I need to research it more. If it did then all three tornadoes probably deserve an F4 because there was high-end destruction in Beaumont near the very end of the path.
Haven't finished mapping it yet, but one of the members of the tornado family in central KY (Fayette County, up near Lexington) likely reached F4 intensity too, although Grazulis has the whole family as a single long-track F3. Even without the Tri-State Tornado, this would've been a pretty high-end event.
(Side note: I also thought it was mildly interesting that the Laconia F4 southwest of Louisville touched down in basically the exact spot where the Brandenburg F5 crossed the Ohio River.)
Yeah, the Tri-State Tornado reminds me a lot of Jarrell in the sense that the synoptic conditions weren't super impressive at first glance - for very different reasons - but a whole series of unlikely events came together in precisely the right (or wrong) way to produce something extraordinary. In this case, you had a supercell/tornado forming basically right at the triple point (with a fast-moving low to help keep it in an ideal position) plus ridiculously strong low-level winds/WAA that basically poured fuel on the fire just as it was being lit. The temperature gradient across the warm front was very steep (in some cases 25-30º over like 100 miles), as were dewpoints, so the actual conditions directly within the storm's path would've been rapidly becoming more favorable as it approached.
The incredible thing about Tri-State is that it maintained a consistent width and was likely at F5 intensity for the majority of its path....I can't think of any other tornado that maintained that kind of intensity consistently over such a long path. Yeah, Mayfield was on the ground for 165 miles and nearly 3 hours but it was nowhere comparable in intensity like the Tri-State tornado was.
Reported times are kinda sparse and sometimes conflicting, so it's hard to know for sure. If we assume it cycled somewhere in the area north of Saco, MO, the resulting ~179 mile path would've been almost exactly three hours (give or take a few minutes). If we use the maximum realistic path length of ~222 miles (as shown on my map) it's right around 3:45. The supercell itself probably lasted somewhere between six and seven hours.
I don't remember South Carolina getting an F5 tornado.
