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Change in Tornado AP

Flashlight237

Flashlight237

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So yeah... It turns out there's an actual flipping study on tornado KE that gives the KE ratings of tornadoes: https://diginole.lib.fsu.edu/islandora/object/fsu:252956/datastream/PDF/view

Thanks, @Expectro2000xxx , for showing me that. In page 22 of the study, we are given the average KE ratings of each tornado on the Enhanced Fujita Scale. They are as such...

EF0: 0.086 Terajoules (20.55449331 tons; City Block Level)
EF1: 0.844 Terajoules (201.7208413 tons; Multi-City Block Level)
EF2: 4.27 Terajoules (1020.554493 tons; Small Town Level)
EF3: 18.9 Terajoules (4517.208413 tons; Small Town Level+)
EF4: 51.3 Terajoules (12260.99426 tons; Town Level)
EF5: 102 Terajoules (24378.58509 tons; Town Level)
2010 Tallulah-Yazoo City-Durant tornado: 516.7 Terajoules (123.4942639 kilotons; Large Town Level)

To add further onto this, the study provided us with ways to CALCULATE tornado KE ourselves, which I think would be useful since many fictional tornados are small AF like the one caused by Taz when he spins. Mhmm. So yeah, I think it's time to change up how we handled tornadoes.
 
Okay, seems this is fair game, but at the same time, I've a feeling I'll need a little more discussion given how big this is.
 
We should rewrite it to use Simpson's Rule for the integration instead.
So, how would we determine the fraction of path area in practice?
And, which parts of the tornado are considered? Like, how high up is it assumed to go and stuff?
 
Flashlight237 said:
So yeah... It turns out there's an actual flipping study on tornado KE that gives the KE ratings of tornadoes:
Click to expand...
Pretty sure we already used something like this years ago, but these numbers are way too general to just slap onto an instance of a tornado being made when we can just manually calculate it, often getting very different results based on how big it actually is
 
DMUA said:
Pretty sure we already used something like this years ago, but these numbers are way too general to just slap onto an instance of a tornado being made when we can just manually calculate it, often getting very different results based on how big it actually is
Click to expand...
Yeah, we probably should know what the average size that those numbers correspond to is, so that we can judge whether their use is justified.
 
DontTalkDT said:
Yeah, we probably should know what the average size that those numbers correspond to is, so that we can judge whether their use is justified.
Click to expand...
From a quick glance I think I got their data for width and length path from this U.S document, which begin to show various tables with the width and length path from page 22, though I could be wrong, a better look at the document should be given since I focused mostly in the result values when sharing them with the person who created the blog currently used in the site for tornadoes KE.
 
I can't find anything regarding the average sizes of tornadoes and their respective yields or destructive power, or anything of the sort. I found an article that has a F0 tornado measuring in length 2 miles and 60 yards wide, the May 2004 F4 tornado was 2.5 miles wide and the EF3 2013 El Reno tornado was 2.6 miles, but that's about it.

At page 32 of that pdf document in the OP it reads "The tornado with the most energy was the Tallulah-Yazoo City-Durant tornado of April 24, 2010 with a TKE of 516.7 TJ. It tracked more than 240 km (149 miles) and was more than 2.8 km (1.75 miles) wide at its widest."
 
I think that this seems great to apply to our Tornado page.

vsbattles.fandom.com

Tornado

A tornado is a violently rotating column of air, in contact with the ground, either pendant from a cumuliform cloud or underneath a cumuliform cloud, and often (but not always) visible as a funnel cloud. Tornadoes come in many shapes and sizes, but they are typically in the form of a visible...
vsbattles.fandom.com vsbattles.fandom.com

However, I think that we will have to restructure it to a regular calculation instruction page format, somewhat similar to this one:

vsbattles.fandom.com

Earthquake Calculations

An earthquake (also known as a quake, tremor or temblor) is the perceptible shaking of the surface of the Earth. Earthquakes can be violent enough to toss people around and destroy whole cities. Such earthquakes being caused by characters are a method useable to determine Attack Potency. For the...
vsbattles.fandom.com vsbattles.fandom.com

Thank you very much for helping with improving the quality of our wiki. 🙏🙂❤️
 
Expectro2000xxx said:
From a quick glance I think I got their data for width and length path from this U.S document, which begin to show various tables with the width and length path from page 22, though I could be wrong, a better look at the document should be given since I focused mostly in the result values when sharing them with the person who created the blog currently used in the site for tornadoes KE.
Click to expand...
Dark-Carioca said:
I can't find anything regarding the average sizes of tornadoes and their respective yields or destructive power, or anything of the sort. I found an article that has a F0 tornado measuring in length 2 miles and 60 yards wide, the May 2004 F4 tornado was 2.5 miles wide and the EF3 2013 El Reno tornado was 2.6 miles, but that's about it.

At page 32 of that pdf document in the OP it reads "The tornado with the most energy was the Tallulah-Yazoo City-Durant tornado of April 24, 2010 with a TKE of 516.7 TJ. It tracked more than 240 km (149 miles) and was more than 2.8 km (1.75 miles) wide at its widest."
Click to expand...
@DMUA @DontTalkDT

you guys asked for more info on the OP earlier and no general ruling has been made on it yet so input is still needed
 
DontTalkDT said:
So, how would we determine the fraction of path area in practice?
And, which parts of the tornado are considered? Like, how high up is it assumed to go and stuff?
Click to expand...
I still pretty much have these questions. I don't understand how we would gather the data needed for the KE method in OP's document from a feat in fiction. And I don't know which modifications it may need for, say, tornados that go less high up than real ones.
 
Dark-Carioca said:
I can't find anything regarding the average sizes of tornadoes and their respective yields or destructive power, or anything of the sort. I found an article that has a F0 tornado measuring in length 2 miles and 60 yards wide, the May 2004 F4 tornado was 2.5 miles wide and the EF3 2013 El Reno tornado was 2.6 miles, but that's about it.

At page 32 of that pdf document in the OP it reads "The tornado with the most energy was the Tallulah-Yazoo City-Durant tornado of April 24, 2010 with a TKE of 516.7 TJ. It tracked more than 240 km (149 miles) and was more than 2.8 km (1.75 miles) wide at its widest."
Click to expand...
On top of this I also just now found this study which says:

"Half of all tornadoes (in the US) have TKE (total kinetic energy) exceeding 62.1 GJ and a quarter have TKE exceeding 383.2 GJ. One percent of the tornadoes have TKE exceeding 31.9 TJ. [...] Alabama ranks number one in terms of tornado energy with 2.48 PJ over the period 2007–2013."

"TKE is computed for all 8752 tornadoes in the SPC database over the period 2007–2013. There are many more weak tornadoes (EF0) than strong ones (EF2 and higher) so the values are highly skewed with a median TKE of 62.1 gigajoules (GJ) and a interquartile range between 9.1 and 383.2 GJ. On a logarithmic scale the distribution is symmetric (Fig 1). Ten percent of the tornadoes over the period have TKE exceeding 1.97 terajoules (TJ or 10^12 joules), five percent have TKE exceeding 5.53 TJ and one percent have TKE exceeding 31.9 TJ. The tornado with the most energy is the Tallulah-Yazoo City-Durant tornado of April 24, 2010 with a TKE of 516.7 TJ. It tracked over 240 km from Louisiana through Mississippi with a width of 2.82 km at its widest."

The study also shows with one table that the EF-Scale doesn't necessarily equate to the tornado being more powerful (I think someone up there might've already mentioned this), one EF5 tornado had a TKE of 353.7 TJ while an EF4 had a TKE of 516.7 TJ.

Though the study then goes on to contradict that and say:

"For instance over the period 2007–2013 the average energy of the nine EF5 tornadoes is just over 100 TJ (Fig 2). The average energy of the 57 EF4 tornadoes is half of that at just over 50 TJ. The average energy of the 232 EF3 tornadoes is less than half of the EF4 and the average energy of the 818 EF2 tornadoes is significantly less than half of the EF3."

And even shows a graph for "Average tornado energy by EF rating category"

pone.0131090.g002.jpg


This could be useful for the page.

Out of curiosity I also made a calc based on this graph and study.

Edit: This was already in Flash's OP, I'm silly
 
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If I do recall, EF rating is based on speed, not size or energy. That'd explain why certain lower ratings generate more energy than higher ratings. A bigger tornado moving at a slower speed might generate more energy than a smaller tornado moving at a higher speed. However, it's clear that on average, higher ratings generate more energy.
 
Vrokorta said:
If I do recall, EF rating is based on speed, not size or energy. That'd explain why certain lower ratings generate more energy than higher ratings. A bigger tornado moving at a slower speed might generate more energy than a smaller tornado moving at a higher speed. However, it's clear that on average, higher ratings generate more energy.
Click to expand...
It's based on speed yeah, in part, as well as how destructive they get.

Also I'm very silly, that study was already posted by Flash up there xD

Looking at what Expectro shared above, in particular this table:

F0 = 3.98 x 10^7 J = 9.512428298279 kg of TNT (Small Building level)

F1 = 6.11 x 10^8 J = 146.0325047801 kg of TNT (Small Building level+)

F2 = 7.35 x 10^9 J = 1.756692160612 tonnes of TNT (Building level+)

F3 = 1.29x10^10 J = 3.083173996176 tonnes of TNT (Large Building level)

F4 = 1.11 x 10^11 J = 26.52963671128 tonnes of TNT (City Block level)

I'm not sure if calculating them is possible at the end of the day but we can still determine the power and rating of a tornado based on the destruction it causes.
 
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Dark-Carioca said:
It's based on speed yeah, in part, as well as how destructive they get.

Also I'm very silly, that study was already posted by Flash up there xD

Looking at what Expectro shared above, in particular this table:

F0 = 3.98 x 10^7 J = 9.512428298279 kg of TNT (Small Building level)

F1 = 6.11 x 10^8 J = 146.0325047801 kg of TNT (Small Building level+)

F2 = 7.35 x 10^9 J = 1.756692160612 tonnes of TNT (Building level+)

F3 = 1.29x10^10 J = 3.083173996176 tonnes of TNT (Large Building level)

F4 = 1.11 x 10^11 J = 26.52963671128 tonnes of TNT (City Block level)

I'm not sure if calculating them is possible at the end of the day but we can still determine the power and rating of a tornado based on the destruction it causes.
Click to expand...
It's a slight downgrade to the values of the currently used calc, with the only slight upgrade being in reference to EF4 tornadoes.
 
Indeed.

Though yeah I'm not entirely sure what to go with.

The 2023 study with these results is closer to Flash's calc but only uses 164 tornadoes and landspouts as reference, while the 2015 study's Total Kinetic Energy, which is much higher than what we currently use, is computed for all 8752 tornadoes in the Storm Prediction Center’s (SPC) severe weather database which is the most extensive set of historical tornado records in the world, which makes me a bit more inclined to trust it (the 2015 study is also more extensive overall, I feel).

I dunno if we could maybe have a chart or list where we include both similar to the Earthquake Power Chart which has Radiated Waves and Total Seismic Energy, as one study seems to focus on simply KE while the other focuses on the total kinetic energy which would likely include its rotational KE.

You were behind the original calc, what are your thoughts? @Flashlight237
 
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