June 21st 2023 Matador TX Tornado Discussion

[Sawmaster]

I think they know they deserve to be bashed for calling a high-end tornado an EF3 and just want his to become a distant memory as fast as possible.

Ain't.
Gonna.
Happen.

 

[JBishopwx]

I say give it a few more weeks. If they don't update it within a month or so, then bash them but that's just me.

 

[Sawmaster]

I say give it a few more weeks. If they don't update it within a month or so, then bash them but that's just me.

Nope because that would let them get what they're wanting here: to have this insanity become distant and forgotten. Which is EXACTLY why the opposite must occur, so that they get no rest or relief till they do the right thing. I'm a realisy and long ago I stopped believing in the tooth fairy: Too many times in the past this "give them a chance" thing has been tried and it's almost universally failed.

More to the point, if they were even considering an upgrade the QRT folks would have been called in as normal protocol so there's that to consider. There's also the fact that cleanup is going to alter or destroy whatever on scene there was to consider, so they're done considering as there's been plenty of time for that.

James, I respect and appreciate your call for calm and patience, but as good as those intentions are they are wrong this time. I think it fair to say that everyone here firmly and with reason beieves that this Matador tornado exceeded EF3 windspeeds. We've seen the many years the NWS promised corrections and all we've3 gotten is very minor adjustments and additions. In the past we've seen disparity with other tornado ratings but not to this level of obvious excessive error. If we are EVER going to get the rating system fixed then we need to unite and make THIS tornado our poster-child starting now and continued without let-up until we begin getting realistic results instead of this kind of quackery. We are never going to get a better chance than this, a case where anyone and everyone (except the NWS and engineers) can clearly see how badly the official system performs in advancing the science of tornado study and classification.

Sincerely,
Phil

 

[TH2002]

Clearly, the only ones who have the potential to set the record straight here are Marshall and LaDue. Whether you like them or not (especially Marshall), their two cents is our last chance for a more reasonable rating for Matador. LBB has made it pretty clear they really don't give a s**t, but I doubt they'd go against Marshall and LaDue should one of or both of them decide it ought to get its very much deserved upgrade to violent tornado status.

 

[Sawmaster]

Matador is but one (and the most blatant one). My goal is a system fix for ALL tornadoes, not just Matador.

 

[TH2002]

Matador is but one (and the most blatant one). My goal is a system fix for ALL tornadoes, not just Matador.

Inaccurate tornado ratings are so depressingly common it doesn't even bother me at this point. Marshall himself basically admitted that tornado ratings are pretty much meaningless these days.

Now, should things be better? Absolutely, but I'm not even sure where to place any tornado rating credibility anymore. The screeching weenies on twitter, the people on twitter complaining about weenies, and lazy survey teams complimented by overly stringent engineers with college degrees are all one and the same IMO. People who actually know what they're talking about like DGX's survey teams are out there, but hard to come by.

 

[Shakespeare 2016]

Nope because that would let them get what they're wanting here: to have this insanity become distant and forgotten. Which is EXACTLY why the opposite must occur, so that they get no rest or relief till they do the right thing. I'm a realisy and long ago I stopped believing in the tooth fairy: Too many times in the past this "give them a chance" thing has been tried and it's almost universally failed.

More to the point, if they were even considering an upgrade the QRT folks would have been called in as normal protocol so there's that to consider. There's also the fact that cleanup is going to alter or destroy whatever on scene there was to consider, so they're done considering as there's been plenty of time for that.

James, I respect and appreciate your call for calm and patience, but as good as those intentions are they are wrong this time. I think it fair to say that everyone here firmly and with reason beieves that this Matador tornado exceeded EF3 windspeeds. We've seen the many years the NWS promised corrections and all we've3 gotten is very minor adjustments and additions. In the past we've seen disparity with other tornado ratings but not to this level of obvious excessive error. If we are EVER going to get the rating system fixed then we need to unite and make THIS tornado our poster-child starting now and continued without let-up until we begin getting realistic results instead of this kind of quackery. We are never going to get a better chance than this, a case where anyone and everyone (except the NWS and engineers) can clearly see how badly the official system performs in advancing the science of tornado study and classification.

Sincerely,
Phil

I will run them through the ringer. I am sick and tired of this BS existing. Despite if anyone forgets the rating for the Matador I will always remember. just like I remember Westminster 2006.

 

[Shakespeare 2016]

I am tired of people like Phil is saying that NWS will say there going to do something but they never do. Being nice does not go anywhere with these NWS offices. I have been patient and nice for many years and this BS on I need a well-built house to rate a tornado despite overwhelming extreme contextual damage that supports at least a high-end EF4+ rating. I am 43 and if people want to think I am immature I don't care.

 

[Shakespeare 2016]

Nope because that would let them get what they're wanting here: to have this insanity become distant and forgotten. Which is EXACTLY why the opposite must occur, so that they get no rest or relief till they do the right thing. I'm a realisy and long ago I stopped believing in the tooth fairy: Too many times in the past this "give them a chance" thing has been tried and it's almost universally failed.

More to the point, if they were even considering an upgrade the QRT folks would have been called in as normal protocol so there's that to consider. There's also the fact that cleanup is going to alter or destroy whatever on scene there was to consider, so they're done considering as there's been plenty of time for that.

James, I respect and appreciate your call for calm and patience, but as good as those intentions are they are wrong this time. I think it fair to say that everyone here firmly and with reason beieves that this Matador tornado exceeded EF3 windspeeds. We've seen the many years the NWS promised corrections and all we've3 gotten is very minor adjustments and additions. In the past we've seen disparity with other tornado ratings but not to this level of obvious excessive error. If we are EVER going to get the rating system fixed then we need to unite and make THIS tornado our poster-child starting now and continued without let-up until we begin getting realistic results instead of this kind of quackery. We are never going to get a better chance than this, a case where anyone and everyone (except the NWS and engineers) can clearly see how badly the official system performs in advancing the science of tornado study and classification.

Sincerely,
Phil

Tornadoes rated as violent F4/EF4 and F5/EF5 since 1990 and by decade.

1990-1999...92
2000-2009...45
2010-2019...66
2020-2022...13

Percentage of tornadoes rated as violent F4/EF4 and F5/EF5 since 1990 and by decade.

1990-1999...92/12,146~0.75%
2000-2009...45/12,726~0.35%
2010-2019...66/11,991~0.55%
2020-2022..13/.3552~0.37%

 

[Shakespeare 2016]

Tornadoes rated as violent F4/EF4 and F5/EF5 since 1990 and by decade.

1990-1999...92
2000-2009...45
2010-2019...66
2020-2022...13

Percentage of tornadoes rated as violent F4/EF4 and F5/EF5 since 1990 and by decade.

1990-1999...92/12,146~0.75%
2000-2009...45/12,726~0.35%
2010-2019...66/11,991~0.55%
2020-2022..13/.3552~0.37%

F4 and F5 tornadoes on the F-SCALE were already quite rare. How rare do they have to be on the EF-SCALE?

 

[atrainguy]

Can somebody repost the photos of the stripped cars and snapped parking bollards? I can't find them for the life of me.

Not sure if these are the specific ones you are looking for, but here's a couple pics of parking lot damage I saved from the first thread.

 

[Austin Dawg]

This underestimating seems to be happening much easier than before. There have always been discrepancies in some past tornadoes, but cases like this are weird. What is the reasoning behind underestimating a tornadic event this extreme? I can't help but remember Mayfield and the furor on this website with that given rating. It's confusing to an armchair weather person when the opposite happens, like Rolling Fork and the agreement across the board here when those findings were published.

So is it poor/bad work or some other reasoning that is behind the obvious low-balling the rating? I look at these pictures and the examples don't match the final word.

 

[Shakespeare 2016]

This underestimating seems to be happening much easier than before. There have always been discrepancies in some past tornadoes, but cases like this are weird. What is the reasoning behind underestimating a tornadic event this extreme? I can't help but remember Mayfield and the furor on this website with that given rating. It's confusing to an armchair weather person when the opposite happens, like Rolling Fork and the agreement across the board here when those findings were published.

So is it poor/bad work or some other reasoning that is behind the obvious low-balling the rating? I look at these pictures and the examples don't match the final word.

I am dumbfounded by the rating. A tornado like Matador should be rated at least a high-end EF4.

 

[Sawmaster]

The engineers by their nature say "Prove it" while there is nobody else involved with enough intelligence and/or chutzpah to say "Prove that it isn't" right back to them. Then the engineers pop up the lame and worn excuse that "it's a damage scale, not a windspeed scale" while assigning and categorizing based on estimated windspeeds. Estimated? From an engineer? Unacceptable, or should I say more bluntly hypocritical. And we already know what damage to expect from specific construction versus specific windspeeds but we could advance the art in assigning windspeeds closer to what actually happened, such as needs to be done here with Matador.

We need someone in a high enough position at the NWS to think on their own to tell the engineers the truth: "Thanks, but we'll do the surveys and ratings, and if we need you we'll call you". There's nothing anywhere in the DOD indicators so complex a 6th grader couldn't quickly learn how to use it, and TBH, I don't think they would do any worse than the engineers. The engineers stopped contributing anything exclusively useful long ago. All they do now is cause contention- they are NOT advancing any art or science here to any significant degree.

Moreso, the NWS seems to be less and less interested in dealing with this partly because they get bashed by using the engineer's faulty methods, but mainly it's probably because they're not learning or gaining anything useful from this anymore making the effort pointless. We need to change that.

 

[Shakespeare 2016]

The engineers by their nature say "Prove it" while there is nobody else involved with enough intelligence and/or chutzpah to say "Prove that it isn't" right back to them. Then the engineers pop up the lame and worn excuse that "it's a damage scale, not a windspeed scale" while assigning and categorizing based on estimated windspeeds. Estimated? From an engineer? Unacceptable, or should I say more bluntly hypocritical. And we already know what damage to expect from specific construction versus specific windspeeds but we could advance the art in assigning windspeeds closer to what actually happened, such as needs to be done here with Matador.

We need someone in a high enough position at the NWS to think on their own to tell the engineers the truth: "Thanks, but we'll do the surveys and ratings, and if we need you we'll call you". There's nothing anywhere in the DOD indicators so complex a 6th grader couldn't quickly learn how to use it, and TBH, I don't think they would do any worse than the engineers. The engineers stopped contributing anything exclusively useful long ago. All they do now is cause contention- they are NOT advancing any art or science here to any significant degree.

Moreso, the NWS seems to be less and less interested in dealing with this partly because they get bashed by using the engineer's faulty methods, but mainly it's probably because they're not learning or gaining anything useful from this anymore making the effort pointless. We need to change that.

Tornadoes can be rated EF4 or even EF5 by using extreme contextual damage. Think about the Westminster 2006 tornado. It could have been rated F4 or possibly even F5 by the extreme contextual damage alone. There appeared to be at least one home that appeared to have some of its sill plates were pulled from the concrete slab. There was no house as it had been pretty much entirely swept away. All that was left was a little bit of stick size debris. Once Gary Woodall told me through an email that ground scouring or tree debarking doesn't guarantee debris above F3/EF3. I asked him about the completely mangled cars from Westminster and he said something about a vid of a tornado flipping cars around in the parking lot. I just thought whatever you totally missed tne point. No, I am not afraid to speak against world renowned engineers.

 

[KCweatherboy]

Well I am glad to know that we have an engineering student among us. You must be good at math. I took a lot of math classes when I was in college. In your opinion do you think hardwood trees that are stripped of all their, extreme scouring of the ground and vehicles that are completely disassembled and left totally unrecognizable can be rated high-end EF4+ I have been studying tornado damage for 20+ years and would like to have someone's opinion who is becoming an engineer or is a brand new engineer.

Unfortunately, that's not my area of expertise as I study Industrial Engineering and Data Engineering. My opinions on the rating are also from the fact that I've been obsessed with studying tornadoes and tornado damage for the last ~13-15 years since I was a kid.

However, I will say from a data engineering/machine learning standpoint one of the big things we learn & build are classification models, and the EF Scale works the same way as it is designed to place tornado damage into different classes. Based mainly off the contextual damage I've seen, and how it compares to other well known violent tornado damage, it should belong in the same class as them aka an EF5 rating.

I'd like to think one day, we'd be able to have a Machine Learning algorithm that can rate tornadoes based on damage pictures which would be quicker, more consistent, and honestly more scientific than the current process. The main problem would be (because I think the tech could be created if enough people cared/were interested) is that you need a fully correct dataset to train and create an accurate model...

which would require some thorough data cleaning and correcting misclassified ratings to do.

 

[Sawmaster]

which would require some thorough data cleaning and correcting misclassified ratings to do.

This is one of my major concerns: The longer we keep doing it wrong, the more work there will be to make it right.
Another reason to act now instead of waiting

 

[Shakespeare 2016]

Unfortunately, that's not my area of expertise as I study Industrial Engineering and Data Engineering. My opinions on the rating are also from the fact that I've been obsessed with studying tornadoes and tornado damage for the last ~13-15 years since I was a kid.

However, I will say from a data engineering/machine learning standpoint one of the big things we learn & build are classification models, and the EF Scale works the same way as it is designed to place tornado damage into different classes. Based mainly off the contextual damage I've seen, and how it compares to other well known violent tornado damage, it should belong in the same class as them aka an EF5 rating.

I'd like to think one day, we'd be able to have a Machine Learning algorithm that can rate tornadoes based on damage pictures which would be quicker, more consistent, and honestly more scientific than the current process. The main problem would be (because I think the tech could be created if enough people cared/were interested) is that you need a fully correct dataset to train and create an accurate model...

which would require some thorough data cleaning and correcting misclassified ratings to do.

I would even accept a high-end EF4 rating for the Matador but anything less than that is blasphemous. If I had my way it would be rated EF5.

 

[buckeye05]

I would even accept a high-end EF4 rating for the Matador but anything less than that is blasphemous. If I had my way it would be rated EF5.

There's not quite enough for EF5 in terms of house damage. The 190 - 195 MPH range is appropriate IMO.

 

[Shakespeare 2016]

There's not quite enough for EF5 in terms of house damage. The 190 - 195 MPH range is appropriate IMO.

I don't necessarily disagree with you but it produced some of the most extreme contextual damage I have seen in a long time.