Western_KS_Wx
Member
With Greensburg it really is difficult to tell exactly where it reached maximum intensity, there’s three spots on aerial imagery where the scouring in open fields appears the most intense, just after crossing Highway 183, a little over a mile south of town and then on the north side of town. I was particularly impressed with tree damage in a ravine south of town, many completely debarked or ripped out of the ground and thrown, root-balls and all. However the damage patterns were extremely complex and erratic, very clearly numerous violent vortices made especially evident within Greensburg. Also makes comparing it to other violent tornadoes a little difficult, as there really wasn’t a well-defined centerline or consistent, continuous swath of EF4-5 damage in one part of the tornado. One example of this is as it crossed Highway 400 (also called Kansas Avenue) there were 3 separate swaths of extreme EF4-EF5 damage simultaneously, all evenly spaced a couple hundred yards apart with clearly weaker damage in between. The main ‘centerline’ of the tornado shortly after crossing the highway weakened causing mostly EF2 and spotty EF3 damage, while two separate areas of EF4+ damage on the east and west side of the centerline persisted, before it all seemed to come together past the railroad tracks. That being said, the damage in several areas is well on par with some of the most violent ever documented.I don't like paywalls in general, but in hindsight TornadoTalk's decision to introduce a paid membership was an understandable one; they're certainly not the equivalent of a massive mainstream media outlet that already gets boatloads of revenue from online and television advertisers. Still, my biggest gripe from back when they first rolled out the change is that they put summaries which were previously free behind the paywall.
Regarding Greensburg, the more I hear about it, the more impressed I am by the fact it was already weakening as it passed through town. By this point I'm more or less convinced it would have caused West Frankfort or Smithville tier damage had it hit Greensburg at full-on intensity.
Smithville and several tornadoes from that day did have some information lost on the official NWS website if my memory is correct. Quite a few of the violent tornadoes and especially the EF3 tornadoes were pretty poorly surveyed and TornadoTalk uncovered several spots of violent tornado damage that was missed by surveyors. I truly believe the true number of violent tornadoes that day was likely well over 20.Wasn’t Smithville one of the events that the NWS lost a lot of info on? It was some sort of website revamp that they did if I remember correctly. That is one of the tornadoes of 4/27 that I wish had been more thoroughly surveyed.
TornadoTalk’s article is pretty good but I still think there are several damage feats and unanswered questions that we may never know about or the answers to.