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Dixie Alley kinda stops at I-75. There's a few events that slip east of there (Just look at the event just back in April) but once you get east of I-75 major violent tornado events start to get fewer and further between.
Really interesting, makes me wonder as to what exactly is going on down there climatology wise.
 

warneagle

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Really interesting, makes me wonder as to what exactly is going on down there climatology wise.
I would assume it's that they're farther east, so they're not getting as much direct moisture return off the Gulf as Alabama and Mississippi are. Strong/violent tornadoes do happen, but they're often early-season high CAPE/low shear events like 1/22/27 or 3/1/07.

It's also worth noting that Georgia had its own high-end EF4 controversy on 4/27/11 with the Ringgold tornado, which could have easily been rated EF5 under a more liberal interpretation of the damage. The Rainsville EF5 also passed into Georgia, but the EF5 damage was only in Alabama.

I grew up right along I-75 in Georgia and my town had one of the stronger tornadoes in Georgia's history, an F4 back in 1953: https://www.tornadotalk.com/warner-robins-ga-f4-tornado-april-30-1953/
 
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Is it possible to have an EF4 or EF5 tornado in the western states like California, Nevada, or Arizona etc ? I think the furthest violent tornado documented west was the Teton, Wyoming F4 tornado on July 21, 1987.
 
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Is it possible to have an EF4 or EF5 tornado in the western states like California, Nevada, or Arizona etc ? I think the furthest violent tornado documented west was the Teton, Wyoming F4 tornado on July 31, 1987.
Minor correction, Teton occurred on July 21, 1987-July 31 is the date of Edmonton, Alberta, still pretty crazy both highly anomalous events occurred within 10 days of each other. Anyways, there was an F3 tornado tornado that occurred in Portland, Oregon and traveled into Vancouver, Washington in 1972, so that could be a further west violent tornado. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1972_Portland–Vancouver_tornado

Also, don't forgot the October 2010 Arizona outbreak, with multiple wedges tracking throughout remote areas of Arizona. The strongest was an EF3 that, since it passed through remote wilderness in the Navajo Nation, couldn't have a properly-verified path length as the only DI it encountered was 3 radio transmission towers in the middle of the desert: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_2010_Arizona_tornado_outbreak
 
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Ok I corrected it. Some people believe the Edmonton, Alberta tornado was an F5.
Yeah, it's another one of those borderline cases, like Tuscaloosa. It caused it's most extreme damage in a few specific areas, and the high-end F4 rating for it estimated windspeeds up to 258 mph...just a few mph short of F5 status.
 
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Might as well add this. While not stricly a tornado in the original definition of the term, this was a massive fire whirl that caused damage equivalent to an EF3 tornado in California back in 2018. So, this could definitely be considered a violent vortex phenomena that occurred far west:

 

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Barneveld was discussed quite a bit on the old thread....on the edge of town it threw cars up to 300 yards & completely leveled and partially swept away a brick church that had a poured concrete foundation, and I think that was the basis for the F5 rating.
From my understanding, Barneveld was rated F5 mostly based on a group of homes swept completely away along Swiss Lane outside of town. Close up photos show a lack of anchor bolts though. I think the rating is quite questionable.
 
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IIRC, there was one tornado that struck Louisiana in the early 1970s that was rated F5 because it had stripped a fairly large building off its basement walls; indeed, for a time an aerial image of the damage was used as an illustration of F5-level damage in official documentation. However, a closer inspection of the image shows that the basement walls were constructed of cinder block without much (if any) reinforcements visible; if that was seen today it would get at most an (E)F2 rating. However, this is just a recollection; I could have some of the details wrong, but hopefully the general gist is still accurate.
I think this was the Inverness, MS tornado from the February 1971 Delta Outbreak....it actually started in Waverly, LA before crossing the Mississippi River into, uh, Mississippi state. It was rated F5 for the damage it did near and at Waverly, all the damage in MS it did was in the F2 to low-end F4 range, at most. Many tornadoes of that outbreak were so destructive simply because they encountered an incredible amount of frail structures and were probably significantly overrated based on the damage they did. The structures were cheap and frail as they were largely plantation housing for African-American sharecroppers and were holdovers from the Jim Crow era. A government disaster report revealed much of these unpleasant facts and it was a major source of embarrassment for the Mississippi legislature, to put it kindly.
 
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Yes, Parkersburg is often overlooked in the conversation but I think one of the most impressive of the relatively small club of official EF5s. I was chasing that day but only made it to southwest Wisconsin (flying blind other than occasional calls to a nowcaster, no in-car data back then), where I basically just let the now non-tornadic storms roll over me at Lancaster.

Rainbow, Lancaster, WI 5/25/2008 by Andy, on Flickr

Post-storm sky, Lancaster, WI 5/25/2008 by Andy, on Flickr

Those videos of Cordova are really spectacular. The perfectly sculpted and widely visible low-level supercell structure is certainly rare for Dixie Alley. Many of the storms that day were unusually visible/photogenic (apart from trees) by the region's standards. Even Hackleburg, which was probably the closest to a Dixie"standard" murky rain-wrapped wedge, had periods where it was quite visible from certain angles.
Why exactly do most tornadoes in Dixie Alley have really low-hanging cloud bases that are not clearly visible like in the Cordova video?
 

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Why exactly do most tornadoes in Dixie Alley have really low-hanging cloud bases that are not clearly visible like in the Cordova video?
Dixie alley, especially the gulf states, tend to have low cloud bases because there's a lot of moisture and humidity in the atmosphere. Since they're right above the Gulf of Mexico they usually get high dew points in order to get low-level cloud bases. Cordova' cloud base was very low, if you were in the middle of trees and looked off in the distance you would just see the low base, you couldn't even see the tornado. Though it also depends where your looking to see the bright white or the dark grey tornado.
 
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Does anybody know about the Chandler, MN tornado on June 16, 1992 and if it deserved an F5 rating? I know there was also a tornado in Broken Arrow or Broken Bow on April 2, 1982 that was rated F5 but the houses swept away were poorly anchored/built.
 
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Does anybody know about the Chandler, MN tornado on June 16, 1992 and if it deserved an F5 rating? I know there was also a tornado in Broken Arrow or Broken Bow on April 2, 1982 that was rated F5 but the houses swept away were poorly anchored/built.
These 2 links got some good information on it:

1. https://www.weather.gov/fsd/19920616-tornado-chandlerlakewilson

2. https://www.mnopedia.org/event/chandler-lake-wilson-tornado-1992

A few pics of note:

Chandler.jpg

A vehicle stripped to it's frame and a house that more or less vanished on the edge of town. The tornado's lone fatality occurred here at this location:

Chandler 2.jpg

Some possible ground scouring but I'm not sure. Quite a few pics of the damage have combine harvesters next to brown soil so it could be already plowed but not sure.

The only known video footage of it:

 
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These 2 links got some good information on it:

1. https://www.weather.gov/fsd/19920616-tornado-chandlerlakewilson

2. https://www.mnopedia.org/event/chandler-lake-wilson-tornado-1992

A few pics of note:

View attachment 3583

A vehicle stripped to it's frame and a house that more or less vanished on the edge of town. The tornado's lone fatality occurred here at this location:

View attachment 3582

Some possible ground scouring but I'm not sure. Quite a few pics of the damage have combine harvesters next to brown soil so it could be already plowed but not sure.

The only known video footage of it:


It is one of those tornadoes I am not sure how to feel it should be rated. If it is F5 it looks pretty minimal to me.
 
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It is one of those tornadoes I am not sure how to feel it should be rated. If it is F5 it looks pretty minimal to me.
If the house was well-built it might have warranted an F5 rating. The more I think about there is quite a bit of ground scouring in the first pic as well (look at the house's front yard and hills in the background) so maybe it achieved F5 status but only very briefly and over a small area. It was on the ground for over an hour, so it definitely had potential.
 
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If the house was well-built it might have warranted an F5 rating. The more I think about there is quite a bit of ground scouring in the first pic as well (look at the house's front yard and hills in the background) so maybe it achieved F5 status but only very briefly and over a small area. It was on the ground for over an hour, so it definitely had potential.
It is probably one of those borderline case scenarios. I would think today most NWS offices would probably rate it an EF4.
 
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It is probably one of those borderline case scenarios. I would think today most NWS offices would probably rate it an EF4.
Same. The vehicle stripped to it's frame is pretty impressive, though. It's quite similar in some ways to the Barrie, Ontario tornado of 1985...it stripped a vehicle to it's frame and wrapped it around a tree and leveled some factories but the majority of it's damage was no more than F3, at most.
 
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Same. The vehicle stripped to it's frame is pretty impressive, though. It's quite similar in some ways to the Barrie, Ontario tornado of 1985...it stripped a vehicle to it's frame and wrapped it around a tree and leveled some factories but the majority of it's damage was no more than F3, at most.
I think Canada is pretty conservative on how they rate their tornadoes.
 
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