Discussion on the TF-Scale.

[Warren Eckels]

F scale, home construction

The official Fujita scale does make allowance for the quality of home construction, using terms like "mobile homes", "well-constructed houses" and "frame houses".

http://www.spc.noaa.gov/faq/tornado/f-scale.html

 

[Stuart Robinson]

Steve, I am rather curious about the number of recorded Tornado events in New Zealand and would like to read up further on this if I can ~ Is there any internet information on this and do you who has done the research and logged the events. I understand that it is the North island that is hit the most.

 

[Ben Cotton]

Originally posted by Stuart Robinson
I am glad that a sensible debate has evolved out of this thread and really I do believe that as the boundaries of Tornado research pushes forward, a more finer resolution of tornado scale rating will be required, if not a must, if we are going to improve and verify our forecasts and models worldwide.

Stuart, great thread you've started. It's nice to see some intelligent discussion in W&C again. I agree with you wholeheartedly. We do ned a better tornado rating scale. Here's the problem: can't be done. Right now, we lack the ability to accurately measure the wind speeds in a tornado. While tools like wind engineering studies, photogrammetry (sp?), and radar measurements can provide useful information (sometimes more useful than others), we still don't know what goes on right there at the surface. Until we can better measure tornadoes, trying to adopt a universal scale (especially one of high resolution) is a futile task.


Ben