I do find if fascinating, in a way, how we seem to get hung up on the EF scale and damage indicators vs DOW measured wind speed. I'm curious as to why this is, given our limitations and the fact that we cannot have a DOW on every storm, or even every major storm. Everyone brings up El Reno (why we key on that storm above any other re: rating discrepancies is something that I do not know), and yet I don't hear anyone saying, "If we'd had a DOW on Tuscaloosa or Blanchard or Goldsby in 2011 they might have been EF5s based on measured wind speeds." That aspect of this discussion that comes up time and time again is something I wonder about.
I have to agree with Randy though, simply because we're still not getting ground speed measurements. Everyone likes to cite the DOW measuring El Reno at nearly 300 mph, but at what height was that wind speed measured? If we can get measurements under 10m, it might be a better way to do it, but that would likely require a DOW to put itself into a compromising situation, and as someone with a ton of experience driving vehicles that large or larger, I'm completely against that idea just to get a 10m or less reading. I'm also not sure how the final rating matters as much as we make it out to be, considering they've always been meant to be estimates. Engineers need more hard data to help design things to withstand severe weather events, so I don't see how a rating, in and of itself, without any hard data accompanying it, is useful, weather it's called an EF3 or an EF5. And quite frankly, wind speeds at 200-600m isn't of much value to someone designing a house that might be 10-20m tall at most unless we can find some correlation between winds at that level and 10m and below.