This pictures shows the tornado damage to a sub-division in Forney, Texas, and it appears to have been hit by the strongest of the tornadoes that criss-crossed the Dallas-Ft. Worth metro area on Tuesday April 3, 2012.
Today, the day after the tornadoes, several teams of National Weather Service investigators fanned out across this part of Texas to look at the damage. That happened after the Aumsville, Oregon, tornado, too.
Instead of CSI (the CBS hit show about Crime Scene Investigators) I think of these folks as TSI – Tornado Scene Investigators.
In a place like Fornery, they are specifically looking at what kinds of buildings were hit, how those buildings were built and/or re-inforced, and what kind of damage was done. This is how they determine the actual wind speed each tornado had at specific location.
Like evidence left behind at a crime scene, the damage left behind after the Dallas tornadoes tells investigators what happened–and what kind of windspeeds it took to make the damage happen.
In this case, because the walls of a home were all ripped down, the National Weather Service says this sub-division saw windspeeds up to 150mph, meaning this was an EF-3 tornado that touched down and the most powerful to hit the Dallas area on April 3.
EF stands for ‘Enhanced Fujita’Scale – it’s a relatively recent upgrade to the work pioneered by Japanese American scientist Ted Fujita. He’s the one who figured out we could nail down tornado wind speeds by looking at what the tornado did. Here is the EF-Scale or Enhanced Fujita Scale. Tornado windspeeds and the damage they do.
To read more on these Dallas area tornadoes and see Dallas tornado damage pictures and posts, check out the facebook page for the National Weather Service office in Dallas-Ft. Worth Texas.
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