Any sort of ground scouring is unreliable to be honest, and those debarking can easily be debris loaded
1.) That take on scouring is a steaming pile of absolute stinking bs. Grass scouring, and specifically lawn scouring, is highly correlated to tornadoes of extreme intensity. I just typed out a multi paragraph post on how I’ve been cataloging every violent, hell, every intense tornado of my life time, and many prior. While a lot of scouring (like farm field scouring) is overhyped, instances the scouring and removal of all surface vegetation, particularly lawn grass,
only occurs in the immediate vicinity of very high end damage. It’s not like you ever see properties with basically no grass left, and the house left in an unswept heap or with walls intact, barring some western/central Oklahoma counties where the ground is more scour prone. It otherwise simply
does not happen.
If I were to put together a statistical analysis of every tornado that scoured grassy surfaces, especially lawns, down to exposed dirt, the correlation between this occurrence and high-end events would be
undeniable. I am sick and tired of people throwing out these dismissive generalizations without even coming close to having amassed the amount of observational note taking on instances of grass scouring that I have, over the course of a decade and a half of note taking to boot. There’s a reason why people like LaDue and Marshall still consider it a high-end hallmark. You clearly think you’re really saying something big and well-informed, but trust me, you’re not. I literally cannot express how big the disparity is between the validity you think your stance has, and how little it has in reality. Abysmally stupid take, and I can’t stress that enough.
2.) Debris loading is only a significant factor in putting less weight in contextual damage if it can be linked to a specific airborne material.
All significant tornadoes that impact semi-populated are debris loaded. If there’s no specific link to a specific airborne material, the debris loading argument is a vague generalization soaked nothing burger.
