• Welcome to TalkWeather!
    We see you lurking around TalkWeather! Take the extra step and join us today to view attachments, see less ads and maybe even join the discussion.
    CLICK TO JOIN TALKWEATHER

Significant Tornado Events

same way that i feel the using trees to downgrade a tornadoes rating is kinda strange. homes are far more susceptible to tornadic damage than trees are. like how tiv 2 inside a tornado recorded winds of up to 180MPH mid range EF4 intensity. yet the trees and grass right next to tiv 2 were almost completely unscathed. *still would like too know how the heck that works but it kinda proves my point...i guess...idk im still learning*
 
Pretty excited that I finally found a couple of photos from the Salix, IA F4 the day before New Richmond. The quality is terrible, but I don't care. I didn't really expect to find anything at all. They're from a series of shots taken by the head of the Sioux City weather office, so I'm hoping the originals (or at least decent-quality reproductions) are still out there somewhere.

Anyway, this is the Malloy home just southeast of Salix, or what little was left of it. Parts of the house (described as a "fine new home") were carried up to a mile and five of the seven family members were killed; two of them were thrown nearly half a mile.

LEiDWaj.jpg


This is a neighbor's home a few hundred yards away - it, too, was a large house that had been built fairly recently. Witnesses described seeing the whole structure lift high up into the air before breaking apart and "scattering to the four winds." Thankfully the family had made it to their storm cellar and were unhurt.

GCFRhxu.jpg


From various descriptions of the path, it sounds like this tornado produced some pretty high-end debarking + ground scouring. It was only around 300 yards wide (probably more like 50-100 yards if you're talking about the swath of intense damage) but it moved quite slowly and was widely visible as it crossed the Missouri River and approached the south side of town. It was described as moving "only as fast as a man can walk," although it probably wasn't that slow. I'm reasonably confident this was part of a family of at least three tornadoes, but the others mostly destroyed barns and silos and whatnot.
 
xJownage said:
Contextual damage cannot be used to assign an EF-5 rating without a building that fits the qualifications for it in the first place. None of the previously assigned EF-5 ratings were like that either so I don't know where this misconception about how EF-5s are assigned came from.
Click to expand...
It's fine to hold this opinion. But then Philadelphia, Rainsville and El Reno in 2011 have to be downgraded based on this principle undoubtedly to keep consistency. No qualified house for either of them.
 
A piece of damage from the Lindon CO F3, aka the tornado after the famous Last Chance wedge from 1993. Some kind of tank that was rolled uphill, based on the commentary on the tape a distance of 100 yards. Unfortunately I have no means of contacting the original videographer (not for a lack of trying, mind you!), Bill Reid was the one who supplied the tape to me, so it’ll probably be a very long while before I can make the video itself public. 6EDC2E5B-EE9E-44C9-9918-7CC3555B3E0C.jpeg2243F0D1-DAAE-4A67-9199-BB0414417F6B.jpeg015B6AD8-8651-452F-9D1D-D26CA46F50B8.jpegB0527186-19A3-42A2-A9B0-AFA6118B836E.jpeg
 
pohnpei said:
It's fine to hold this opinion. But then Philadelphia, Rainsville and El Reno in 2011 have to be downgraded based on this principle undoubtedly to keep consistency. No qualified house for either of them.
Click to expand...
Again we see that the problem in in the system. One can easily argue that Philadelphia,Rainsville, and El Reno are right and the others wrong. If a building sustains damage which can only happen at EF-5 level then why is any other proof needed? Same for natural damage. It either is or it isn't, and the windspeed hasn't changed so quite obviously the improper methodology is where the discrepancies are- and we can change that ;)

Phil
 
Sawmaster said:
Again we see that the problem in in the system. One can easily argue that Philadelphia,Rainsville, and El Reno are right and the others wrong. If a building sustains damage which can only happen at EF-5 level then why is any other proof needed? Same for natural damage. It either is or it isn't, and the windspeed hasn't changed so quite obviously the improper methodology is where the discrepancies are- and we can change that ;)

Phil
Click to expand...
exactly the excuse they used to downgrade both vilonia and mayfield...
 
The rating scale or EF scale for tornadoes is very very inexact science. In all honesty it’s the most flawed scale for weather/natural phenomena out there at the moment. Hurricanes can be directly measured I.e. pressure and wind speed, earthquakes as well are directly measured
and they’re all almost 100% of the time accurate. Tornadoes are so complex and nearly impossible to directly measure that we use damage alone to ‘estimate’ a tornadoes intensity. In doing so the true intensity of a tornado could be, and often times is, severely underrated just because it didn’t hit much or the structure it impacted wasn’t well-built enough and lowballed, even though winds may have been significantly higher in that location than the rating states. The closest thing we have to measure the strength of a tornado is dow however even with that it could be flawed as well, some examples of this include El Reno 2013 where winds topped 300mph in subvortices however vegetation, tree, and structure damage was no where near that of an EF5 also Rozel KS 2013 where winds were 185mph but again no damage was found that came close to EF4. Then you have tornadoes that may harbor over an open field for its life but contain winds of 300+mph and are capable of extreme damage but get rated much lower due to non structure impacts. It’s all very flawed and likely will be for quite some time unless some new invention or scale comes about.
 
and then they'll just straight up break the rules of the scale. (rating a large anchor bolted duplex that had been largely swept away as mid range EF2 off of the vague assumption that it had been hit by debris... in which case if they'd want to be consistent they should rate every tornado that hits a city several categories lower than what the scale allows because every structure that got damaged most likely was hit by debris.) its an argument that shoots itself in the foot and tries to Band-Aid the wound with wet leaves found in a dumpster. its vague. it doesn't work. and it should be gotten rid of. get it out. stop using it.
 
Western_KS_Wx said:
The rating scale or EF scale for tornadoes is very very inexact science. In all honesty it’s the most flawed scale for weather/natural phenomena out there at the moment. Hurricanes can be directly measured I.e. pressure and wind speed, earthquakes as well are directly measured
and they’re all almost 100% of the time accurate. Tornadoes are so complex and nearly impossible to directly measure that we use damage alone to ‘estimate’ a tornadoes intensity. In doing so the true intensity of a tornado could be, and often times is, severely underrated just because it didn’t hit much or the structure it impacted wasn’t well-built enough and lowballed, even though winds may have been significantly higher in that location than the rating states. The closest thing we have to measure the strength of a tornado is dow however even with that it could be flawed as well, some examples of this include El Reno 2013 where winds topped 300mph in subvortices however vegetation, tree, and structure damage was no where near that of an EF5 also Rozel KS 2013 where winds were 185mph but again no damage was found that came close to EF4. Then you have tornadoes that may harbor over an open field for its life but contain winds of 300+mph and are capable of extreme damage but get rated much lower due to non structure impacts. It’s all very flawed and likely will be for quite some time unless some new invention or scale comes about.
Click to expand...
Why exactly can't we measure windspeeds in tornadoes directly? Couldn't we do it with highly specialized radar or something?
 
Juliett Bravo Kilo said:
Why exactly can't we measure windspeeds in tornadoes directly? Couldn't we do it with highly specialized radar or something?
Click to expand...
Radar can only measure velocity inside tornados not the true air motion. Those velocity can be directly used as wind speed in hurricanes but not in tornados cause tornados contains debris which make the situation way more complicated. Other limited factor of radar also limite the ability of radar to measure tornados directly like beam blockage and height issue. The most direct way to ever measure tornados that I can think of was those probes designed by Tim Samara which can help us get direct pressure data at 0m inside tornados but It takes extreme luck to get such data and most of time we don' know If the probe was at the absolute center of the tornado.

So for now, damage is still the best way to measure tornados' intensity as It reflect what this tornado capable of at the very ground level.
 
Last edited:
and then you have tornadoes like pampa texas 1995 and elie manitoba 2007 that got boosts to there rating from video recordings of them. and you just have the wonder..........why on earth did the recent Andover ks tornado not given the same treatment? i've never seen more concrete proof of video showing a tornado was much stronger than its rating implies...same with the Katie tornado...i wonder if that'll ever return...
 
We simply don't have a better way to rate tornadoes than based off of damage. The ultimate goal should be for a damage scale to be as objective as possible; but that's extremely difficult when we're talking about violent tornadoes. We're unlikely to ever have 0m wind data on more than even a very select few tornadoes until there's a major breakthrough in radar technology, so as is, the only thing we can do is judge off damage. The EF scale has its problems, but remember that contextual evidence like ground scouring is extremely subjective, in that soil types/composition, rain, etc all play a major role in the strength of scouring. For all we know, tornadoes can have higher or lower horizontal wind speeds independent of the strength of their vertical updraft wind speeds. There's so much we still need to learn, it's impossible to have "the right scale". Even if we had a new scale go into operation tomorrow, there would still be controversy about ratings.
 
Western_KS_Wx said:
The rating scale or EF scale for tornadoes is very very inexact science. In all honesty it’s the most flawed scale for weather/natural phenomena out there at the moment. Hurricanes can be directly measured I.e. pressure and wind speed, earthquakes as well are directly measured
and they’re all almost 100% of the time accurate. Tornadoes are so complex and nearly impossible to directly measure that we use damage alone to ‘estimate’ a tornadoes intensity. In doing so the true intensity of a tornado could be, and often times is, severely underrated just because it didn’t hit much or the structure it impacted wasn’t well-built enough and lowballed, even though winds may have been significantly higher in that location than the rating states. The closest thing we have to measure the strength of a tornado is dow however even with that it could be flawed as well, some examples of this include El Reno 2013 where winds topped 300mph in subvortices however vegetation, tree, and structure damage was no where near that of an EF5 also Rozel KS 2013 where winds were 185mph but again no damage was found that came close to EF4. Then you have tornadoes that may harbor over an open field for its life but contain winds of 300+mph and are capable of extreme damage but get rated much lower due to non structure impacts. It’s all very flawed and likely will be for quite some time unless some new invention or scale comes about.
Click to expand...
question. are you gonna use that file on the DAT called. gray_sky_2021_nadir for the rest of the track of mayfield? idk if you can trust it considering how disjointed it is...specially since its doesnt contain the bremen portion. and that most of the track east of kentucky lake is so hard to make out with the lighting. i'd like to see how you solve the problem of mapping bremen.
 
tornado examiner said:
question. are you gonna use that file on the DAT called. gray_sky_2021_nadir for the rest of the track of mayfield? idk if you can trust it considering how disjointed it is...specially since its doesnt contain the bremen portion. and that most of the track east of kentucky lake is so hard to make out with the lighting. i'd like to see how you solve the problem of mapping bremen.
Click to expand...

Most likely I will that’s really the only file I know of that shows the whole track, I need to figure out how to overlay that on Google earth and whatnot. I’ll probably save the Bremen portion of the track for last and finish the rest first.
 
Western_KS_Wx said:
Most likely I will that’s really the only file I know of that shows the whole track, I need to figure out how to overlay that on Google earth and whatnot. I’ll probably save the Bremen portion of the track for last and finish the rest first.
Click to expand...
bremen will be tricky...but it is the most important part because it contains the most intense damage...may need to use a combination of YouTube videos and pictures
 
tornado examiner said:
bremen will be tricky...but it is the most important part because it contains the most intense damage...may need to use a combination of YouTube videos and pictures
Click to expand...
Yeah I’ll figure it out eventually, this whole thing is going to be tricky. Would’ve been made so much easier if Google earth used more imagery sort of like what they did for Tuscaloosa where the whole track was available.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top