Talk:Tornado records

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I removed

"Costliest thunderstorm: May 16, 1995 during the "Mayfest" in Fort Worth, Texas. A hailstorm with hailstones the size of grapefruits hit the city causing $2 billion in damage.

The list is about tornadoes, and I could find no mention anywhere that a tornado was involved in this event. Joyous 05:27, Jul 1, 2004 (UTC)

Not to mention it isn't even accurate as the most destructive (non-tornadic? non-tornadic damage?) thunderstorm and it is very difficult to obtain all the damage costs from thunderstorms compared to tornadoes. Evolauxia 23:18, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

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My deletions

Biggest single tornado: During the Super Outbreak of April 3, 1974, one tornado left a 5 mile wide damage path near Frankfort, Kentucky.

This appears to be Tetsuya Theodore Fujita's Super Outbreak tornado #54, which is documented as 800 yards wide in Thomas Grazulis' Significant Tornadoes 1680-1991. However, in the various maps shown in this reference, the path of #54 seems to be exceptionally wide as it died out - significantly more than other 800 y tornadoes in the Super Outbreak, although not likely to be five miles wide. If someone can clearly document a wider pathlength, please cite a reference.

I would shy away from a 'biggest single tornado' entry in any case, since methods of estimation of tornado size aren't especially reliable.

That entry is definitely erroneous; and yes there are great problems in determining "widest" tornado. It is no longer listed as a record due to various issues. A decent candidate is the Hallam, Nebraska tornado of May 22, 2004 which was found to have a 2.5 mile wide damage path by an expert survey team. Evolauxia 23:18, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

The Wilber/Hallam Nebraska Tornado is the largest, according to both[1] and [2].

Neither of which are authoritative sources (such sources are listed in the Hallam tornado outbreak article) and it doesn't change the very real difficulties involved in path width determination, but Hallam is a solid candidate.

Slowest ground speed: Less than 10 mph (16 km/h) during the Central Texas tornado outbreak.

Ground speeds of essentially zero for tornadoes have been noted in the past. According to Grazulis, the June 2, 1929 Hardtner, Kansas tornado was observed to be nearly stationary at several places in its path. Its parent cloud was stationary for an hour.

Yes, many tornadoes have been stationary part or all of their lives, so it should not be listed. Evolauxia 23:18, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

Verification

Most significant coincidence: A small town in Kansas called Codell was hit by a tornado on the exact same date three years straight! A tornado hit on May 20, 1916, 1917, and 1918. The U.S. gets 100,000 storms a year; only 1% produces a tornado. The odds of this coincidence occurring again is practically infinitesimal to nonexistent.

Yes, according to Grazulis. Such an occurrence is extremely unlikely - again according to Grazulis, the average frequency for a tornado strike at any particular place in Kansas is once per 2,060 years. The chance of three strikes in successive years on the same day in (relatively) the same place is very low. But the most likely place for it to happen is Oklahoma, followed by Kansas.

Reference - Thomas P. Grazulis; Significant Tornadoes: 1860 - 1991; Environmental Films; ISBN 1879362007 (hardcover, 1993)

Catbar (Brian Rock) 02:07, 30 Mar 2005 (UTC)

It is worthy of mention but I renamed the subtitle. Evolauxia 23:18, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

No fatal tornadoes in Canada during the 1990's?

The fact that Canada didn't had a killer tornado in the 1990's is not true. I checked in La Presse's archives and there has been one fatal F2 tornado in St-Charles east of Montreal in July 1994 - which killed a local doctor. The article is in French and not accessible by Internet but here's the source : M-F Leger, "Deja six tornades et l'annee n'est pas fini", June 11th 1994, La Presse, Montreal, p.A1 ---> The translation should be : "Already six tornadoes and the year is not over"--JForget 19:06, 11 June 2006 (UTC)

Path Lengths

In accordance with the following website [3], the longest tornado path was 293 miles. A weather book I own confirms this measurement.

That is definitively wrong. The 293-mile path length for the Mattoon-Charleston, Illinois Tornado of May 26, 1917 was listed as the longest tornado decades ago but was found to be a tornado family. The longest tornado path is fairly indisputably the Tri-State Tornado where no breaks in damage were found; even in possible cases where differing members of a tornado family and downbursts masked damage, it still would hold the record. Evolauxia 23:18, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

La Rochelle tornado, September 1669 is said to have travelled over 400km (maybe even more, as it possibly began as a waterspout over Bay of Biscay). However, it is entirely possiblethat it was a family of tornadoes. --Mikoyan21 15:01, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

Maximum Winds

I edited the wind speeds to agree with the Doppler on Wheels website [4] and with the refereed publication on the Red Rock tornado. Hebrooks87 20:36, 20 June 2006 (UTC)Hebrooks87

Narrowest F5 tornado

I was wondering if anyone knows what was the "smallest" F5 tornado in width, I know I saw at a page ([5] the Oakfield tornado was only 100 yards wide when it was an F5, although there were probably one or two that may have been smaller then that when they were AT F5 strength. --JForget 01:04, 16 July 2006 (UTC)

Kansas May 2003 F5?

Is there a citation for the statement that one of the F4s in Kansas in May 2003 was considered to be an F5 before being rated F4? There were two F4s that month in Kansas (Crawford County and Leavenworth/Wyandotte County). I don't know the thought process of the Quick Response Team survey on Crawford County, but my office mate was on the other one that assigned the rating and no one on the team considered it an F5. It had marginal F4 damage [6]. Hebrooks87 13:02, 16 July 2006 (UTC)Hebrooks87

I believe there was some talk about the NWS Springfield rating the Franklin/Girard, KS tornado an F5, but they didn't do it for whatever reason. However, they did say that it was high-end F4 [7]. Incubusman27 23:39, 9 March 2007 (UTC)

I believe the issue was that a house had been totally oblitterated and debris scattered, however, it was downwind of a lumberyard, and since the flying lumber likely did most of the damage, it was downgraded to an F4. -RunningOnBrains 07:08, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] "Deadliest tornado of the 80's"

Umm ok why are the 80's so special?? Were there no deadly tornadoes in the 70's? Or even the 60's for that mater?DPM 21:36, 8 September 2006 (UTC)

There certainly were deadly tornadoes in every decade preceding and following the 1980s, but the '80s are considered by some to have been a relative low point in tornado activity, especially violent activity - and violent tornadoes have historically caused the most deaths on average. However, the Saragosa event of 1987 was far from being a sole outlier in an otherwise lull. Other major events of the 1980s included the 1989 Huntsville, AL tornado, which killed 21; the 1985 outbreak in OH and PA which was the worst on record for that region; and the 1984 Carolinas outbreak which included several F4 tornadoes and caused 57 deaths. Perhaps a list of deadliest tornadoes by year or by decade would be better, and would show death toll trends better than highlighting one event from one decade. CapeFearWX 03:57, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Coincidence?

A tornado occurring at a specific date and time doesnt seem to be much of a coincidence. I'm sure if you look hard enough you could find one at 12:34 on 5/6 of one year...it's just not that spectacular of an occurrance. Plus, it was 11:11 PM, which is 23:11 in many countries. I'm going to remove it. -Runningonbrains 22:26, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Most damaging

The SPC top 10 damage table has some serious problems and shouldn't be used. For starters, it only goes back to the beginning of Storm Data. Second, the use of the central values in the damage category that were used up through 1995 creates some really odd values, given the breadth of the categories (e.g., 50 million-500 million is designated as 250 million.) This is especially troublesome given that some of the cases actually have damage amounts in the text entry in Storm Data (the paper copies, not necessarily the online approximation.) As an example of this problem, combined with another problem, the first entry, with $1,250,000,000 in 1973 dollars is the Conyers, GA tornado. In the paper version of Storm Data, the damage is given as $89M for the tornado. This gets translated using the central value as $250M, nearly tripling the damage from the reported value. In addition, for that case, the tornado hit a total of 5 counties. In the online Storm Data, each county is credited as having $250M in damage (the central value of the class). When it gets taken from the county-based description back to the total track, that results in a total of $1,250M compared to the actual reported damage from the text description of $89M, a factor of 14 overestimate. On the other hand, the Wichita Falls tornado gets underestimated since the reported damage was $400M.

This doesn't even take into account the fact that inflation-adjustment is probably not the correct adjustment to make in any event. Wealth adjustment is probably more representative. A better reference to the history of damage, starting with the historical work on collecting damage estmates done by Tom Grazulis, is Brooks and Doswell (2001), which gives both inflation and wealth adjustment numbers going back to 1890. From that, the Oklahoma City tornado is the most damaging tornado when an inflation adjustment is applied, and 11th most damaging when wealth-adjustment is applied. 1896 St. Louis, is the damaging tornado by that metric, in US history. Hebrooks87 20:57, 9 April 2007 (UTC)

I concur. Why is that even on the SPC site? Edwards or whomever should know better than publicizing data in that way. Evolauxia 07:27, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

Wow, I had no idea the data was so inaccurate. I assumed an SPC page would be accurate enough. Will correct using the source given. -RunningOnBrains 18:22, 11 April 2007 (UTC)

FWIW, the newly updated damages list pretty well matches that found in Grazulis' newer book, The Tornado: Nature's Ultimate Windstorm (ISBN # 0-8061-3258-2). The one discrepancy is that Grazulis ranks the Omaha, NE tornado of 1975 lower, placing it between the St. Louis and Xenia events in adjusted damage. His listing of approx. $111 million in (unadjusted) damages comes from a 1976 article in the Omaha Sunday World-Herald which apparently estimated the final damage total at $111,234,732. At any rate, both that total and the one on this page are much lower than the $500 million to $1 billion estimates that used to be quoted for that storm (including on the SPC page!). Anyway, glad to see the updates. CapeFearWX 03:46, 3 May 2007 (UTC)