DapperShark
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Jan 21, 2018
Many people think it has something to do with insurance, personally I don't think that's the case, in practical terms there's really not that much of a difference between high end EF4 and EF5 damage, your house has been wiped off the face of the earth either way. I think it has more to do with the NWS becoming extremely autistic about building codes along wih the EF scale being applied inconsistently.Semi-related question. I've heard that some of the controversial EF4 ratings in the last 10 years are due to certain emergency funding being available only for EF5 tornadoes, so meteorologists are being politically pressured to give artificially low ratings.
Any truth to this?
There's also something to be said about the EF scale being outdated and limited if what you want is to know how powerful a tornado really is, since its based solely on damage if a strong tornado doesn't hit something that is rated for EF5 it won't get the rating and if it doesn't hit anything it'll get a ridiculously low rating. The most infamous example of this is probably the 2013 El Reno tornado, a record breaking 2.6 mile wide multivortex monstrosity with Doppler radar confirmed 300mph+ winds, initially rated EF5 based on the Doppler radar analysis but since it spent most of its life over open fields and didn't hit much of anything it was later downgraded to EF3. If you were to apply the same logic to say, nukes, the Hiroshima bomb would be rated higher than the Tsar Bomba which is just silly.
I don't get why they refuse to take Doppler radar readings into account, instead of trying to estimate windspeeds based on the damage this tells you directly, I get that very few tornadoes can get analyzed this way because its very impractical but there's no real reason to disregard the data in cases where we do have it available.




