weunice

Now that we can literally "see" almost every tornado from radar we know what we have now. Furthermore, with the ready availability of cell phone cameras and whatnot we have seen a drastic increase in weak tornadoes reported. Let's face it, you all watch the chases in the south. You tend to get a whole lot of three things: 

1. Rain wrapped
2. Night time
3. Trees

At least you can see in the plains so historically it might have seemed obvious to us that was tornado alley. I don't doubt a shift to the SE so don't get me wrong but I wonder to the extent that this has always been the case. There have been some epic tornado outbreaks in the south long before climate change was involved. I am thinking of a few oldies like the April 24, 1908 outbreak and the Enigma Outbreak just to name a couple. 

I am an armchair chaser as well. Often though, storms in the southeast, particularly closer to the gulf look more like this. 

https://twitter.com/ScottieWAFB/status/1136661292700319745

This is why I doubt I will ever see a tornado in my neck of the woods in my lifetime (I am ~100 miles from the coast). They are almost all rain wrapped or in poor visibility situations. 

Just now, Roger Smith said:

For validation, what does 60% tornado risk mean? 

If it means 60% chance of a tornado occurring in the watch area, that seems too low (but other products indicate a 95% chance which also seems 5% too low ).

If it means 60% of the watch area will experience a tornado, that seems statistically too high, depending on what is meant by "experience a tornado" -- if it means 60% of the watch zone will be converted to tornado warning boxes then perhaps that comes close to reality here (and we all know that within any given tornado warning box there will likely be a 10-20 per cent conversion to tornado conditions along an actual track within that box). 

60% chance of a tornado happening within 25 miles of a given point. 

1 hour ago, Araqiel said:

HRRR has been semi-consistently painting out this long UH track in central LA this morning, looks like a nice boundary setting up right through there now - easiest to spot on the meso sector loop. GOES-16 image is marginally too big to upload so linked instead. Apologies again if this is the wrong forum, SE only seems interested in NC for some reason.

As a note there are other forums in the Houston, Louisiana (gulf mostly) and Alabama areas that are very active for those regions. It has been sadly typical that those areas do not tend to post in the SE forum here but migrate more to those other more regional weather forums. 

I wouldn't be shocked when all is said and done that the Louisiana flood will end up being one of the costliest river floods in United States history. I drove home to my home in Denham Springs yesterday (I was in the 25% that didn't flood) from Port Allen and I went down a stretch of roads approximately 15 miles long that was covered with debris. Not one mile of that drive escaped the flood. I kid you not when I say I passed well over 1000 piles of debris. 

Right now estimates are between 60,000 and 140,000 homes were flooded and I think a number smack dab in the middle is a pretty good bet to be reality.

It makes me wonder if a rope tornado(<100 yds wide) could move along the ground at 70+mph and still do EF5 damage. Has anything like that ever occured?

I don't know but the Elie Manitoba F5 was not very wide when it was filmed destroying the homes that earned it that rating.