Lessons learned from analyzing tornado damage

Unsafe at Any (Wind) Speed?

“…The estimated wind speeds at 10-m height associated with Fujitascale damage categories are under review by a national panel and they may be revised in the future (McDonald 2002). The Fujita scale is subject to errors in interpretation, as reviewed by Doswell and Burgess (1988), Grazulis (1991Grazulis ( , 1993, Grazulis et al (1993), and Marshall (1993 but is often used to assess damage or wind speeds in tornadoes and hurricanes where no direct wind measurements are available (recent examples include Wakimoto and Black 1994;McDonald et al 1996;Marshall and Troutman 2000;Britt and Glass 2000). In the damage descriptions of the Fujita scale, F2 winds result in "cars blown off highway" and F3 winds result in "cars lifted off the…”