KOCO: EF Scale getting updated to include Doppler radar readings as well as damage.

[Gavin Nichols]

KOCO threw this out a few days ago. and it caught my eye.
Some of you already know about this, but some people dont. so...
Tornado rating scale proposal could change research ... - KOCO
www.koco.com › article › oklahoma-tornado-rating-scale...

 

[rdale]

Yep - we've been working on this for a while, but formalizing the process takes longer than non-government people are used to If you're at AMS this January or watching online there will be more info.

 

[Mike Smith]

All this would do is bring the EF-Scale back to the original F-Scale which allowed measured winds as well as estimated winds.

 

[rdale]

I'm sure you mean well Mike, but being outside of the process it doesn't appear you have any idea what's happening and jumped to an incorrect assumption. I'll dig up some of the public presentations on the project to help you learn what it actually involves.

 

[Mike Smith]

Rob and Everyone,

Here is the defining chart from the original F-Scale. As you can see, the top horizontal line is wind speed estimated via damage and the second is measured wind speeds. In other words, bringing measured wind speeds (DoW measurements, for example) into an enhanced enhanced Fujita scale is "back to the future."

 

[Gavin Nichols]

I see valid points on both sides, it's both yes and no.
like the current EF scale, it was designed to ESTIMATE the wind speed based on damage, not to narrow it down to a point. back when the F scale was used it was at the time difficult to get an exact wind reading. Yes, it will be similar to the F scale, but buildings as a whole have gotten stronger due to the new building code and it is now easier to measure tornadic winds.

The new scale may or may not be a F scale/EF scale Hybrid, a combination of the two.

 

[Mike Smith]

There may be some confusion w/r/t what I meant by "wind measurements." It does not limit itself to DoW measurements. For example, in 2013 a tornado occurred at Denver International Airport (KDEN). It did not strike any structures but did get close enough to one of the wind measuring stations that a gust to 97 mph was recorded. Under the original F-Scale as originally proposed by Ted, that would have made it an F-1.

Any valid wind observation would have gone into the F-Scale as originally proposed.

 

[rdale]

"The new scale may or may not be a F scale/EF scale Hybrid, a combination of the two."

I'm not sure what your last sentence means - it will be the EF scale still. When it was created, the developers put in a path to make these sort of updates.

 

[Mike Smith]

Rob wrote: "I'm not sure what your last sentence means - it will be the EF scale still."

I wasn't writing about the EF-Scale. I was writing about Fujita's original F-Scale, the topic of #5 in this thread.

 

[Gavin Nichols]

"The new scale may or may not be a F scale/EF scale Hybrid, a combination of the two."

I'm not sure what your last sentence means - it will be the EF scale still. When it was created, the developers put in a path to make these sort of updates.

What i mean is that they will use some elements from the original scale and incorporate them into the new one.

 

[rdale]

Well yes, that's why we're "revising" the EF-scale and not "creating an entirely new EF-scale but still calling it the EF-scale."

 

[Jeff Wright]

Wasn't the Fujita Pearson-Pearson scale to do the same thing?

 

[rdale]

I'm not sure what you mean by "the same thing." The FPP ranked tornadoes based on the length and width of the tornado instead of just damage.

 

[Matt Zumbrunn]

This has been making the rounds

 

[Warren Faidley]

Glad to see this being done. There is no reason calibrated, remote radar data should not be used. I wonder if they will revise past events based on radar, like the 1991 Red Rock, OK tornado?