Is this the end of the accurate tornado climatology data-base? Budget cuts.

[beaudodson]

In my opinion, there are more "straight-line wind" events that are being reported as tornadoes now than historically. Is the entire EF0 increase attributed to this? No, but I also believe it to be non-negligible.

And to be fair, the policy change in your local office has already occurred in several offices around the country. A lot of times these lower end events are photographed by the local EM and the photos get sent to the WCM who assesses the damage from these photographs. Is it ideal? No. But it's practical. The NWS cannot survey, and has not surveyed, every tornado in recent years. There simply are not enough man-hours to cover 1500+ tornadoes.

I think I might be a purist.

That is interesting about the straight line wind comment.

What I should have said earlier was that a lot of events (QLCS tornadoes) that used to be considered straight line wind damage may have in fact been QLCS tornadoes.

I have had some NWS meteorologists tell that they often are not 100% sure on the EF0 events (even some EF1 events).

I won't argue about it being practical. You are correct. When it comes to picking and choosing between what gets cut and what does not - this is an easy choice. I just hate to see the change in our region - where the NWS has put a lot of time and effort into their database.

I was aware that some offices don't even bother to go out and survey the lower end events. One wonders how many tornadoes actually occur each year. There are probably a lot more EF0 and EF1 events than we are aware of. Especially true when it comes to QLCS events.

Have a nice holiday weekend!

 

[Tim Shriver]

Our group, MidWest SSTRC has been doing them for two years now. Trained by the local WFO.

The process is not that hard if you know what your doing, know what your looking for and are trained.

We also held local spotter classes for the NWS.

Tim

 

[Chip Redmond]

Training is something that will cost money as well. I am not saying it will be as much as actually conducting 10s of EF0-2 tornadoes spread throughout your forecast area, but still, a portion of funds would be required to offset this training. It takes time and finances to provide materials and teach these people. There are some offices that do it, but I doubt you will see many others join in. They (Central Region) are already cutting things like student volunteers where all the costs include is running background checks and taking finger prints. Can you imagine how much that really costs?! Especially when they only need do it for a few students a year?! They can do many projects paid employees don't have time to do during shift work and provide valuable insight to forecasting and even save money down the road. But I digress, some money needs to be cut, and depending on the office and region it will be different things. Each will affect the WFO and the entire NWS in many ways that are unusual and seem odd to us, but it is a company as well and put their money where they see it is most valuable to them with as little negative impact that they see at the moment.

Chip

 

[Tim Shriver]

Good training link:

http://wdtb.noaa.gov/courses/EF-scale/index.html