Just out of curiosity since I think I missed the explanation earlier, are these meant to be your personal ratings, your view of what the ratings should've been, what the tornadoes were potentially capable of, etc?
Personal ratings.
could you verify what all of those are on that map? and was happy texas really potentially of high end strength?
Presuming your pick for ND is LaMoure County (Berlin) and your pick for NC is Askewville?
Correct on all three. Surprised you didn't notice Florida - that's because of the February 2, 1998 220+ mph Gate to Gate waterspout near Marathon.
Oh, had to kinda limit my post otherwise it would have been 20 paragraphs long asking about every other state lol.
GTG measurements from NEXRAD are not usually anywhere near the ground so I don’t think it should be used for rating tornadoes at all.
I think in the case of a waterspout that stayed offshore, it's not unfair to say "yeah, that was probably a pretty intense waterspout" if a radar site recorded a couplet similar in intensity to those often observed with violent tornadoes. Whether or not that should be counted in any official database as an F5/EF5 tornado, or given a rating at all, is a different matter altogether.
wat?
As I have said before, I have serious doubts that the 8/16/1973 and 2/9/1978 events were even tornadoes at all, let alone F3 tornadoes. However If one were to consider wildfire-induced tornadoes as true tornadoes, saying California has had an EF3 tornado actually makes sense, given the severity of the damage of the examples I provided.
I actually had said the same exact thing when I saw some before/after shots from the 2021 Mayfield Tornado.
Mayfield was extremely violent and in my opinion the most impressive single tornado in terms of sheer duration and length of EF4+ intensity we’ve seen since at least the 90’s. The Tri-State tornado probably still had a slightly longer path length but I’d say Mayfield wasn’t too far off and probably is in the top 3 for longest path lengths since that time, considering almost all the other events were tornado families. There were some areas I thought could’ve had EF5 potenital along the track, I was pretty impressed with the damage in downtown mayfield where some multistory well-constructed brick buildings completely collapsed and the damage in and around the candle factory was extreme. There was also a flooring store in Mayfield that was utterly obliterated. Cambridge Shores was another spot I thought had some EF5 potential as well and of course Bremen.
What about Princeton? The damage seemed very intense over there and imho, could have EF5 potential.
Has there ever been documented F5/EF5 damage in a downtown area before?
As far as ACTUAL EF5 damage goes, New Richmond, Lubbock and San Justo are the only ones I can confirm.
I know Waco is rated F5, but the downtown area doesn't look like it.
Waco was impressive in its own right but I would call it F4 myself; Vicksburg is an even less convincing F5 (Grazulis rates it F4 but some people feel it didn't even deserve an F4 rating). All this in the same year as Worcester which got an F4 rating... consistency, right?
