Still awaiting the full report but at what point does the definition of "tornado" need to be updated?
The 2011 Tuscaloosa tornado, as it passed north of Downtown Birmingham was fairly wide, but I have heard the words "mesocyclone on the ground" used to describe the 1998 Nashville tornado, which followed our Oak Grove-Birmingham twister.
The elephant trunk/rope from Wizard of Oz makes people forget that the tornado is not just the condensation funnel. The twiser is wider than that. The inflow at your back in some ways can be described as part of the tornado, even if it isn't a true inflow jet. I remember drawings of tornadoes with a kink at ground level that depicted the jet.
That was what destroyed the Goshen Methodist Church in Alabama circa 1994.
Now in terms of records, I seem to remember in the late 1960s very early 1970s that Grazulis described (in his huge tome) a three mile wide F-3 that pushed a 1/4 mile haboob or something in front of it. This was around the time of the big Sunray tornadoes in his book. The big Wyoming tornado tornado, and the one in the mid 1980s (Moshannon state forest was it?) come to mind.
In Tornado video classics, the Coulton event was the widest I had seen that still looked a single funnel.
The very wide distance of the vortices--maybe deserving of being called separate tornadoes--is what caught people--were I to hazard a guess. That and the odd track.
I'm very glad there were few if any chasers around the 1980 Grand Island event--that would have fooled some folks as well from the look of its track.
The El reno radar loop seemed to show the storm absorbing a vortex into itself. Now with Hurricanes you have this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fujiwhara_effect
Now I don't have anything like the training you guys have, but I understand that a mesolow is not the same as a mesolow, but I often wonder about broader circulations that may not be easily spotted that can assert themselves in ways not suspected.
Wasn't there a tropical system some years back where--even after the storm itself died--some circulation remnant went all around the Atlantic, only to become another tropical system? I once even saw a shear lock on a local TV station's radar once. (Not the chaff blob that had Huntsville radar folks stumped a few days ago)
I hope a lot of work goes into this event...
