• After witnessing the continued decrease of involvement in the SpotterNetwork staff in serving SN members with troubleshooting issues recently, I have unilaterally decided to terminate the relationship between SpotterNetwork's support and Stormtrack. I have witnessed multiple users unable to receive support weeks after initiating help threads on the forum. I find this lack of response from SpotterNetwork officials disappointing and a failure to hold up their end of the agreement that was made years ago, before I took over management of this site. In my opinion, having Stormtrack users sit and wait for so long to receive help on SpotterNetwork issues on the Stormtrack forums reflects poorly not only on SpotterNetwork, but on Stormtrack and (by association) me as well. Since the issue has not been satisfactorily addressed, I no longer wish for the Stormtrack forum to be associated with SpotterNetwork.

    I apologize to those who continue to have issues with the service and continue to see their issues left unaddressed. Please understand that the connection between ST and SN was put in place long before I had any say over it. But now that I am the "captain of this ship," it is within my right (nay, duty) to make adjustments as I see necessary. Ending this relationship is such an adjustment.

    For those who continue to need help, I recommend navigating a web browswer to SpotterNetwork's About page, and seeking the individuals listed on that page for all further inquiries about SpotterNetwork.

    From this moment forward, the SpotterNetwork sub-forum has been hidden/deleted and there will be no assurance that any SpotterNetwork issues brought up in any of Stormtrack's other sub-forums will be addressed. Do not rely on Stormtrack for help with SpotterNetwork issues.

    Sincerely, Jeff D.

The Tornado Project

Was not expecting a letter, but I got one in the mail today from Tom Grazulis. He's still working on volume 1, the significant tornadoes from the years 1680 to 1973. He's shooting for publication in 2026.
He's got another batch (100 or so) of copies of volume 2 printed, the strong and violent storms from 1974-2022. He says sales are unpredictable. I had the original big green book and the paperback supplement, but I lost them in a Gulf Coast hurricane in 2005. So, I figured why not order a copy of this one. The Tornado Project made a substantial chunk of change as you may remember with the video collections back in the day.
 
For those of you that have the latest, interesting book...read on. I have some ideas about the Outbreak Intensity Scale (OIS) rankings provided at the end. Grazulis weighted the tornadoes in the outbreak list by using what he calls “multipliers.” He utilizes the numbers 2, 5, 10, and 15 as coefficients for the EF-2, EF3, EF-4 and EF-5 storms, respectively, before tallying. It provided some facility and spread for him.

I thought it might be fun to come up with a physical, scientific reason to create such numbers. Could there be different multipliers that would yield a different ranking? First, we know the man-made, lower-bound windspeed of the EF-numbers. We might choose to use that because we don’t know the range of EF-5. And, it’s also true that wind pressure varies as the square of its velocity.

So given these, I came up with new coefficients of 2, 3, 4.5 and 6.5 for the EF2-EF5 storms in the outbreaks. These are different & lower for the EF-3s, EF-4s, and EF-5s compared to the larger, Grazulis' multipliers. I haven’t created a spreadsheet, but it could be interesting to see how the rankings change / shift with these new numbers applied to those significant tornadoes in the listed outbreaks.
 
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