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Peter Griffin

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Would saturated grounds be more susceptible to ground scouring vs dry/normal ground?
I don't have a degree or anything but I would say definitely depending on soil composition/type. When rain sits in low lying areas it can make the topsoil extremely soft/loose and one would think it would be much easier to lift than more solid dry Earth.

Like I said not an expert maybe someone else will chime in.
 

WIL9287

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(My apologies if there's already a thread in this vein; I checked but I didn't find one.)

So, once upon a time, Talkweather was host to a pretty swell thread called "Significant Tornado Events." I'm sure some of y'all will remember. Full disclosure: I think I initially started the thread in a desperate attempt to get someone to read my blog. Anyhow, thankfully, it quickly evolved beyond that into something I thought was really pretty special. It was a place for lots of knowledgeable folks and newbies alike to post about any particular significant tornado event that tickled their fancy. We swapped stories of obscure events few people even knew existed. We shared hard-to-find photos of popular events. We endlessly debated the proper ratings for any of a thousand different tornadoes. We speculated about which tornadoes were the most intense, which outbreaks were the worst, etc.

It was pretty dang fun. I know there are different threads already started that sort of cover certain aspects of this, but the old thread was always kinda used as a catch-all for stuff that concerned violent tornadoes but didn't really fit elsewhere. I'm not sure what ever became of that thread, but I think it'd be pretty cool to revive it once more. So, sound like a plan?

If we're good to go ahead, I'll be back either tonight or tomorrow with a few things I'd like to share. Y'all are more than welcome to do the same!
Yes!!! I've been waiting for this thread to be brought back from the dead for a couple years now! The original thread was a goldmine!
 

Equus

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I have the original thread archived before the site went down through mid-2014, but don't really know what to do with it. The discussions here are legendary indeed.
 

Shelby

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I think the Vilonia, Arkansas tornado is worth a mention here. Deep ground scouring, denuded and debarked trees and low lying shrubs. A 25,000 pound steel tank thrown over 3/4 a mile. The pictures say it all and I think are comparable to some of the most violent tornado damage I have seen.
 

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andyhb

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I have the original thread archived before the site went down through mid-2014, but don't really know what to do with it. The discussions here are legendary indeed.
Is there a way to send it as a link or a set of images?
 

Shelby

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I live about an hour and a half from Joplin, Missouri. I was able to take some photos after the destruction. I can’t recall exactly how many days had passed when I took these photos. The thing that stood out the most was the tree damage. I saw a post where someone stated the tree density in this area isn’t that great. This isn’t true because Joplin is in the Ozark Mountains. Almost EVERY tree was debarked, denuded and torn apart. The damage was probably most intense around the Hospital. However, I had a friend who lived east of Joplin and she stated the grass around that area was severely scoured from the ground. Another one of my friends survived the tornado. She heard the roar and woke up 4 blocks away. This incident was so traumatic for her that she lived in Europe for several years and had extensive injuries. I have a photo I can’t find of a close up of the semi-truck wrapped around a denuded tree and a another photo I’ll locate where a photo oh Mother Theresa is embedded in a debarked tree. Hope I am not clogging this thread.
 

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Shelby

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This looked to be a storm shelter with a vacant foundation and although you can’t tell from the photo deep gouge marks were embedded in the dirt. The swept away house had been cleaned off. Gigantic rocks which I'm assuming lined the driveway had been pushed up against the foundation. This was on the very southern edge of the tornado. Areas around it looked to be EF2 damage except for streak of very intense damage directly in front and on top of this house.
 

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Shelby

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So, this is pretty wild. On June 18, 1975, a family of eight tornadoes struck roughly between the towns of Bartley and Arnold in Central Nebraska (called the Gothenburg tornado family in reference to the biggest town in the area). Many of the paths were separated by relatively short distances such that it was first reported as a single tornado with a 90-mile length. Five of the tornadoes were rated F3 and one, near Arnold, was rated F4. There were reports of multiple tornadoes on the ground at once, satellite tornadoes, horizontal vortices, etc. At least one of the tornadoes looked rather visually imposing (this was near Peterson, NE):

View attachment 1833

Anyhow, that's not the really interesting bit. No, what makes this event most notable is that it did some distinctly Philadelphia, MS-esque things. To wit:

View attachment 1836

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View attachment 1838

Bit hard to make it out, but here's what you're looking at. The tornado near Moorefield, NE created a "hole" that measured about 10 ft by 6.5 ft and up to 18.5 inches deep. It also created a "crack" that appears to be about the same length as the hole but much narrower. The sides are sharp and steep in some places and more gradual in others. There are a few broken chunks of sod downstream from these features, but otherwise not much else. There's a mangled windmill barely visible in the background of the first picture, but it apparently wasn't associated with these features and there don't seem to be any other debris/missile-related causes.

Greg Forbes studied the event and postulated that some combination of lightning + suction vortex could've caused it, but he was operating under the assumption that tornadic winds alone couldn't do the job. Of course, we've seen since then that tornadoes can indeed do this sort of thing. He took an interesting approach of using soil shear-strength tests to estimate that velocities in the range of 246-291 mph would be required for wind alone. His objection was that the wind speed at the surface must necessarily be zero given the boundary layer physics involved. That stuff's above my pay grade, but my sense is that it's more a theoretical principle than a practical one - given the turbulence of wind flows in tornadoes, the updrafts and downdrafts, variations in surface roughness, debris loading, etc. it seems clear to me that it doesn't hold up in the real world.

Oh, the later F4 tornado near Arnold also did this:

View attachment 1839

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The "O" in the first photo represents the approximate starting location of a pair of combines, one of which weighed 18,500 lbs and the other slightly less. The heavier combine was tossed a tenth of a mile to the location marked "L" and the lighter one, pictured in the second photo, came to rest 0.16 miles away in the spot marked "B." Grain bins and other assorted bits of large debris were lofted pretty substantial distances as well. Trees in the direct path of this tornado at its most intense were also reportedly stripped bare, some of them snapped off just a few feet above ground level.

All in all, another rather impressive (and probably underrated) event that's gone mostly unnoticed because of the remote Nebraska location.
Thanks for sharing! I love hearing about these tornadoes. I wonder if these are super intense vortices that are extremely brief but incredibly powerful? What do you think?
 

Lori

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Shelby, I love what you’ve been bringing to the forum concerning tornadoes (pics and stories are never clogging a thread!!)!! Severe weather is my weather geek focus.
The Joplin tornado was terrifying and as much of a monster as that tornado was, the shrapnel type debris from such a populated area was devastating!!
 

Equus

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Bangladesh might not get talked about much but it's one of the few places on earth with setups that allow it rival North America for tornado intensity, though it seems to be rare their deadly tornadoes are caught on film. Fascinating stuff.
 

pohnpei

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I know there already had tons of discussion about Moore EF5 2013 in many places, but reviews its damage seven years later still get me goose bumps.
Most eyes focued on the damage around Plaza Towers Elementary School and Moore Medical Center and may ingore some very high end damage in other stages of its life cycle.
Tree damage at the bennington of tornado's path(near fist EF4 rating house) was such stunning that I can only remeber very few tornado can reach this level like 08 Pakersburg EF5 and 11 El Reno EF5.

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When tornado was about to leave the city, the second-to-last violent damage area was two very large and well built FR12 houses, one of which was completely swept clean and was rated EF5
before
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after
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Not sure if this should be here or in it's own thread.
Just watched an interesting video by Pecos Bill on how he uses the HRRR during his chase forecasting.


I was curious whether anyone knows of an archive location where I could go back and look at the HRRR reflectivity data for events over the past few years? I'm interested to see how they did or didn't verify in the SE.

Thanks in advance.
 

Equus

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Sooooo I wrote an article on my blog about the deadly Crossroads F4 on November 17, 1957 that struck right down the road from where I live, and somehow missed an excellent write-up a couple years later on AlabamaWx that revealed this tornado was photographed - a fact I had absolutely no idea about, and never expected anyone in this area in the 1950s to have cameras (maybe a little skeptical the photo is of this tornado?) and that photo was on the front page of The Birmingham News the following day. What a beast.

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SGFmoTwister

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Sooooo I wrote an article on my blog about the deadly Crossroads F4 on November 17, 1957 that struck right down the road from where I live, and somehow missed an excellent write-up a couple years later on AlabamaWx that revealed this tornado was photographed - a fact I had absolutely no idea about, and never expected anyone in this area in the 1950s to have cameras (maybe a little skeptical the photo is of this tornado?) and that photo was on the front page of The Birmingham News the following day. What a beast.

View attachment 2660

A little better quality
The_Birmingham_News_Mon__Nov_18__1957_.jpg
 
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