On the night of December 10th 2021 and extremely violent tornado would rip a 165-mile path through western Kentucky, directly impacting the towns of Mayfield, Princeton, Bremen and many others. This tornado would do high end damage, fully sweeping multiple homes off their foundations. The surveyors #youtube

Liked: Is The EF Scale Outdated? On the night of December 10th 2021 and extremely violent tornado would rip a 165-mile path through western Kentucky, directly impacting the towns of Mayfield, Princeton, Bremen and many others. This tornado would do high end damage, fully sweeping multiple homes off their foundations. The surveyors would determine that this tornado was EF4 strength with a maximum windspeed of 190 miles per hour. To understand the decision made by the surveyors you need to understand the history of the EF scale, and how it works. The EF scale in its current form uses damage to determine the maximum windspeeds within a tornado, is this practice outdated with modern radar as well as videos and simulations of storms? The practice of using damage to analyze tornadoes got its start in 1945 when Tetsuya “Ted” Fujita would analyze the Nagasaki atomic blast on the ground. Ted Fujita would later move to the United States where he would continue his analysis of ground damage, except this time it was in the field of meteorology, specifically on tornadoes. Fujita would theorize that tornadoes had multiple vortex structure based on the damage patterns he observed. In 1974 an extraordinary tornado outbreak would occur; 148 tornadoes would materialize in over a dozen states and Canada. This day would provide the best tornado footage at that time, where tornadoes in Muncie Indiana and Xenia Ohio would verify Fujita’s theory of multiple vortex structure. It was clear using damage to assess a tornado was a valid technique. Over 30 years would pass, until 2007 when the National Weather Service would adopt a new scale, the Enhanced Fujita Scale. This scale was the same as the Fujita scale, except there were slight modifications to the projected windspeeds at each respective category, and there would be 28 outlined Damage Indicators to do a better job outlining surveyed damage to a windspeed. Since its introduction in 2007 there have been only 9 EF5 tornadoes, which is quite low considering there have been over 25,000 documented tornadoes during this time. Is the lack of EF5 tornadoes due to less violent tornadoes occurring? Or is it due to the way the EF Scale works. I believe it is because the EF scale relies on damage to occur for it to rate a tornado. Many tornadoes happen over open fields and do not do any damage that could have been used to rate a tornado. If the EF scale were to also take into consideration vehicle damage, ground scouring, debris granulation, doppler radar, photogrammetry, and simulated environments, I believe tornadoes would be more accurately rated. There are cases where the EF scale has misrepresented a tornadoes strength. The worst example of this was the 2013 El Reno tornado, which was the widest tornado, had measured winds greater than 300 mph, tossed multiple cars over 100 meters, but was only give an EF3 rating because the worst damage it did according to the Damage Indicators was EF3. The second example was the 2021 Western Kentucky tornado also known as the Mayfield Tornado, which swept multiple homes off their foundations and left granulated debris nearby, which in my opinion is indicative of an EF5 tornado. The last example covered is the tornado that hit Rochelle and Fairdale Illinois. The National Weather Service would survey the damage and determine at 20 different spots the maximum windspeed was 200 mph, which is only 1 mph under the cutoff for EF5 strength. This seems unlikely to have not had over 200 mph winds given the incredible video and ground scouring this tornado produced. I am not alone in my criticisms. In 2021 a paper was released by respected scientists that stated “Supercell tornadoes are much strong and wider than damage-based ratings indicate”. The observed that 20% of all tornadoes have extreme winds, which is much more than the 0.4% of tornadoes rated by the National Weather Service. In conclusion, the practice of determining a tornadoes windspeed through the damage it leaves on the ground is an outdated practice that originally started due to the lack of information. With modern technology, additional techniques should be employed to increase the accuracy of tornado wind speed estimations. Paper cited: https://ift.tt/ITbps8X PBS Mr. Tornado: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIAysI2oBRU&list=PLmh4YIWteoGjBFG7z-udPhTAY6vjAa0y0 Follow me on my other socials! IG: https://ift.tt/N8f9hQm Twitter: https://twitter.com/RiskeChris Email: chriske627@gmail.com #Tornado #mayfield #weather via YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7ZXICicfCU