How do you count tornadoes seen?

[JamesCaruso]

Maybe slightly OT, but to the points made by Chris and Christoffer, I think my perspective is sort of between yours... It really doesn’t bother me to not see a tornado, as long as I can experience an impressive supercell. But I am still trying to have the right mindset to think of it as a blessing just to be out there. I mean, I do *think* that way, and tell myself that, but that only goes so far, and I don’t always *feel* that way. If all I get is a garden-variety storm, I’m pretty disappointed. I might feel great just to be out there on the first day or two of a chase vacation, but as the available days dwindle and I’m in danger of coming home without any good supercells (again, don’t really care if there are no tornados) I start getting pretty cranky. Even if I do see some great supercell structure but miss a tornado that did occur and that others saw, I get really pi$$ed off at myself.

This has the potential to be quite the psychologically unhealthy hobby without really working at obtaining the right mindset!

 

[Jeff House]

More for chase vacations, I consider just one intercept success. Will it satisfy? Well, that's a whole other question. Only bust is if all days fail. Intercepts half the days is considered a big success. 2/3 days satisfies well.

Broadly I agree with all above it is more than just tornadoes. However tornadoes are the main purpose. One of my favorite chase days last trip was 5/22/16 when we somehow did not see the Memphis TX tornado despite being there. However the inflow was jaw dropping mind boggling awe inspiring. 1-2 mile long train of dust was going into the storm. At one point I was afraid it's a ghost train so we pulled back. Believe it was more typical broad inflow over dry terrain. Anyway it was so eerie and awesome!

Woodward and all of the DDC cycles the next two days made the trip a resounding success. However the no-tornado Memphis TX day is also a great memory. Chapman/Bennington 2 remains a tough miss though, we stayed too long east of ICT, but DDC pretty much takes away the pain.

I did not go last year. Total Solar Eclipse IMBY was a nice trade though. Had saved the time just in case. Looking very forward to this year!

 

[Todd Lemery]

Not to continue the path off topic, but the one thing better than seeing a tornado is putting someone else in position to see their first tornado. To see that look in someone’s eyes and to know you helped make that happen is priceless. I’ll have the opportunity to do it that again as soon as next week with a retired gentleman that has always wanted to, but has never seen a tornado. I know there’s a few people on this site that kind of specialize in that kind of thing. Kudos to you

 

[Shane Young]

To be honest, I always encouraged folks to just count days... and to use a criteria of a clear touchdown of meaningful time (always called it the one minute rule, though there's no necessary precision in that). The point is you see it... you don't need to check your video later or need someone else to confirm it... have time to "enjoy" it and take it in (generally the idea was you get time to stop and watch it/take pictures/etc... though certainly storm motion and position can make that a challenge at times).

And then when it comes to count for a day, I never saw a ton of point, for the exact reasons you mentioned (what constitutes separate touchdowns gets so foggy). In the end, is a 30 minute long track tornado better or worse than 3 tornadoes lasting a few minutes each? (Or 10 brief touchdowns!?!) Admittedly I didn't have days where I clearly saw multiple long-lasting tornadoes, so that might be an influence. But had enough days where there were murky 2nd and 3rd tornadoes.

In the end, when you look back, each day has special reflections, but what matters is how many of the special days you had?
Or really... even just that you got each day that was an opportunity to get out to chase in the first place

 

[Jeff House]

Yes, I tend to remember tornado days much more than even cycles and certainly more than total tornadoes. Within a day I agree total tornado minutes is most correlated to satisfaction. Can be one long tornado or multiple cycles.

Then you have the intangibles. Two of my best meteorological chases were DDC and Harper/Attica. However two more with fewer cycles, but still great multi-cyclical shows, are ranked as high thanks to the mix of chase partners or somebody's first great tornado day. Those for me are Rozel and the Hennessey OK show a few days after Quinter. Could not go Quinter day but Hennessey was a nice consolation. Somebody else mentioned Hennessey on here a few days back. Maybe due to Quinter, Hennessey is a forgotten 3-4 cycle show.

 

[James Wilson]

My opinion of which I have changed my mind a few times ...

1. A multi-vortex tornado is one tornado as such we do not call it a multi-vortex tornadoes IMO

2. I count all tornadoes out of the same mesocyclone as long as it touches and is gone (no funnel or anything) for at least a minute. Skipping is still one to me.

3. If at the time I think I see one and then later enhance and confirm it counts. If I am enhancing photos and see one it does not count.

4. I have not seen a water spout yet so I would have to think on that

5. I count land spouts but they are like bird farts to me.

6. I count these if for example I see the edge of a rain wrapped wedge. I consider I saw a tornado if I only see the top but do not count it usually unless I can see at least some swirl or debris.

7. This one is usually just a maybenado unless the radar at the time strongly supports a tornado.

 

[Greg McLaughlin]

Here is a brief tornado I count, however the NWS decided not to call this an official tornado because they couldn't access the property to survey any possible damage. The storm was tornado warned at the time of this video.

 

[ELY M.]

@Greg McLaughlin good thing that they are respecting the properties and not trespassing to see if there are any damages.


as for me, I try to have fun seeing the storms and tornadoes.
I remembered went into a hp cell and saw few vortices next to my truck years ago.
next day, I saw spc report of a tornado at exact location that I was at.

I agree about funnels that come down 2/3 way would count as a tornado because
I saw a video of someone who was right under a meso and there were no full funnel down.
he got caught up in dust cloud. i can see dirt flying around this person.

counting is really less important to me,
most important that I got to have fun!

 

[Paul Knightley]

I get that some folks like to keep a record of what they've seen, and can certainly understand it. From my perspective, I've not kept count - I would probably still remember most and try to come up with a count, but overall it's not so interesting to do that for me. For example, this year on May 28th I think we saw between 7 and 11 tornadoes (non-mesocyclone and mesocylone) but I'm not really bothered whether it was one or the other, or in between.

Overall, though, I guess I count it as a 'good' tornado event (from the point of view of photos and so on - no tornado is 'good' per se, of course!) if I can show a non-weather person a picture of it and they recognise it as a tornado. Of course, there are rain-wrapped events, brief spin-ups under the mesocyclone, perhaps with a funnel too, and so on - which may well be bona fide tornadoes, and would likely get me thinking about a steak - but the non-weather person photo test is a good one, for me!

 

[Shane Adams]

I count for myself. I really couldn't care less what anyone else is doing or not.

 

[JamesCaruso]

I count for myself. I really couldn't care less what anyone else is doing or not.

I don’t think most of the posts in this thread are intended in a competitive way. I took at as just, you know, when you love chasing, it’s fun to discuss all of these subjective nuances on the continuum of possible experiences. I, for one, have a somewhat geeky interest in taxonomy, so this topic kind of relates.

Having said that, I am sure that for some chasers their “count” is a source of competitive pride, and I could see this making a great topic for a future Dead Chasers Society video!

 

[Ethan Lang]

For me personally I have land spouts and other non supercell tornadoes in their own category. Otherwise any tornadic circulation ( as in visible ground debris) I see is counted to me as a tornado. However, I am very hesitant when it comes to actually calling things a tornado. I have to clearly observe ground and cloud circulation before I will even say its a tornado, even in my video.

 

[ChristofferB]

Yes, I tend to remember tornado days much more than even cycles and certainly more than total tornadoes. Within a day I agree total tornado minutes is most correlated to satisfaction. Can be one long tornado or multiple cycles.

I agree completely on that. Tornado days is a far more interesting number in that case. I mean, a DDC day obviously beats any other day but for more reasons than the shear amount, but I usually prefer seeing 3 tornadoes in 3 days than 6 tornadoes in one day. Still, it is not a matter of a count to relate to someone else's count but more of a variable to evaluate a season. 2018 I had one single tornado day with 5-6 tornadoes (Cope, CO, land spout fest) on a 16 day chasecation, and although that Cope day was amazing, I would have preferred to have had more tornado days spread out through my chase.

Although tornadoes are my primary goal they are not always what I remember the most of a tornado day. For example Pampa, TX 2016 (a few days prior to DDC, same day as the better Spearman, TX, tornado) offered 4 tornadoes but the lightning that day is what I remember the most. It was the best (or worst, if you will) I have ever witnessed. Like artillery striking down on us, shaking the ground so you could feel it even inside the car.

I guess most of us mainly wants to be awe-struck when we chase. Tornadoes almost always create that feeling but a well structured supercell could beat many tornadoes, a beautiful setting, amazing lightning, large hail, interesting features etc would beat many of the tornadoes I saw in Pampa.

 

[Quincy Vagell]

Reviving this thread a bit for a question/topic and a few other relevant observations from the past few weeks.

For anyone who chased the rain-wrapped tornado near Lawrence, KS on May 28th, are you counting that as a tornado seen, even if it was not clearly visible? It may not matter much. For my own stats, I am going to count it as a tornado, since it was a historical EF-4 and I may have driven through the beginning of it. (as a reference, I was only a block or two away from where a tour van was flipped around the same time) It was a bit different than most rain-wrapped tornadoes I've been near and there was no safe way of seeing it, unless you were in its direct path, or if you got lucky and managed a brief view of the wedge.

Another tornado that I saw that might be worthy of this topic was a brief tornado I saw on May 25th of this year, near Anton, TX. When I first saw a funnel cloud forming out of the corner of my eye, I went back to footage later to review the event. The NWS never counted this as an actual tornado, perhaps because my initial reports to NWS Lubbock were to report it as a funnel cloud/possible tornado. It was tornado-warned around this time, but there was no apparent damage and the probable tornado was short-lived.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1132416298854567937

There were a couple of other reports of brief tornadoes later that event. As I mentioned on Twitter, these were not classic cases of tornadoes forming within a well-developed supercell, but instead hybrid supercells that, through boundary interaction, produced a few brief spin-ups.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1132430647186853888

We've discussed landspouts in this thread and while I do understand that they are tornadoes by definition, I rarely count them in my own personal stats. I observed a landspout like this on May 31st near Marathon, TX. This landspout was one of the odder ones that I have seen, as it was displaced away from the storm (by a couple of miles), was clearly not even close to being connected to any cloud base and just seemed to be an oddball. I will count it as a landspout, but not by definition of what I would count as a tornado seen.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1134663813821796353

I'm referencing this thread in another post, but I thought it might also be a good time to revive this as many of us who chased during the historical stretch in late May of this year may have a few more cases to discuss that could be argued as counting or not counting as tornadoes seen.

 

[Ben Holcomb]

Like @Shane Adams, I count for myself. I count multivortex as 1, satellites as a separate tornadoes (seems kinda contradictory, but eh), and landspouts count, although I've never seen one. As far as quincy's question, I counted April 27, 2014 Vilonia/Mayflower tornado as I was in position to see it, I could hear it but between rain wrapped, dark and unsafe terrain, we hung back a distance. I still experienced the inflow winds, the aural effects and even could smell the famous tornado damage smell right afterwards. The only sense I didn't have was sight and touch.

My list is at Storm Chasing Statistics - Ben Holcomb