00:00A devastating tornado barreling through Enid, Oklahoma in April that leveled homes, uprooted trees, and threw the chassis of an
00:08RV nearly 900 feet away.
00:10Oh, s***!
00:11Here's what we know about EF-5 tornadoes, the rare and most powerful designation on the Enhanced Fujita Scale.
00:18A devastating tornado ravaged Enid, Oklahoma on April 23rd, with shocking videos showing the wind vortex ripping past Vance Air
00:25Force Base and leaving a trail of devastation.
00:29Initial surveys of damage from the National Weather Service designated the tornado as an EF-4, with winds swirling at
00:35more than 166 miles per hour.
00:38But now, new data from researchers at the National Severe Storms Laboratory and the University of Illinois is suggesting the
00:45tornado was stronger than once previously thought.
00:47According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, new analysis suggests that winds from the vortex were actually spinning at
00:55more than 200 miles per hour,
00:56which would make the Enid tornado a rare EF-5.
01:00If upgraded, the Enid tornado would be only the second EF-5 to swirl onto U.S. soil in more
01:05than a decade.
01:06The Post spoke with an expert about EF-5 tornadoes and what this new designation could mean.
01:12My name is Dr. Jana Hauser. I'm an Associate Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at The Ohio State University.
01:17And I'm going to be talking to you today about tornadoes and the Enhanced Vegeta or EF scale.
01:22In order to determine how intense a tornado is, we commonly refer to the EF or Enhanced Vegeta scale.
01:30This is a damage-based scale that is assigned after the fact.
01:35So the tornado occurs, it hits stuff, and stuff might be a house or trees or a Walmart.
01:43And then after the fact, tornado researchers and oftentimes National Weather Service employees go out,
01:50they survey the amount of damage that has occurred, and then they assign a wind speed or a damage rating
01:58through the EF scale in a retroactive way.
02:01We don't have a reliable way to measure winds inside a tornado.
02:07And even if we did, tornadoes are so small in scale that it would be almost impossible to guarantee systematic
02:14measurement in all tornadoes across the United States.
02:17So the wind ratings that you see associated with the EF scale are estimates.
02:23They're not actually taken with an instrument that has observed those wind speeds for that specific tornado.
02:30EF-5 tornadoes are the most rare type of tornado that exists.
02:34They're the most violent.
02:35They're accompanied by wind speeds that exceed 200 miles per hour, and they can basically level anything in their paths.
02:43The most recent EF-5 tornado was the EF-5 that occurred in Enderlin, North Dakota, and that was, again,
02:48upgraded from an EF-4 to an EF-5 after the fact.
02:51But prior to that, the most recent EF-5 tornado was in 2013.
02:57So we had a 12-year gap in EF-5 tornado events.
03:02Now, there are some nuances and tricks that have to be noted and very thoroughly investigated to discriminate, for example,
03:10damage that happens from what we would refer to as a high-end EF-4.
03:14So that would be a tornado that we might see have 190 or 195 miles per hour winds versus an
03:20EF-5.
03:21And some of the things that engineers and National Weather Service damage surveys crews look for are things like how
03:28was a house's walls bolted down to its foundation?
03:33Were there secure hardware mountings that reinforced those walls to the foundation?
03:40Were those mounting brackets stripped off the foundation or were they bent or were they absent?
03:47So it is possible to have a tornado that is producing wind speeds that are greater than 200 miles per
03:55hour, for example.
03:56And that tornado, at the moment that it's producing those intense winds, doesn't actually hit a building, for example.
04:03Or perhaps it's hitting a building on the outer side of the tornado, but the location where those wind speeds
04:09are exceeding 200 miles per hour are not hitting that building.
04:13For the tornado that recently occurred in Enid, there was a group of researchers that went back and performed a
04:18tree fall analysis.
04:19It's a process where high-resolution drone-based images are used to look at tree fall patterns, so the direction
04:28that the trees have fallen,
04:29and then looking at how much force would go into pushing a tree over or uprooting a tree or snapping
04:39a tree of the given size and approximate type.
04:42So is the tree a hardwood tree? Is it a softwood tree?
04:46And then this information we can place into a computer model and simulate a hypothetical tornado of various different strength
04:56winds.
04:56Last year, in 2025, there was an upgraded tornado in North Dakota that hit a town called Enderlin.
05:03Originally, this tornado was given an EF4 rating, and this was a high-end EF4 with wind speeds of about
05:10190 to potentially 195 miles per hour estimated.
05:14After the fact, some wind engineers and scientists got together and used information for a train car that had been
05:22thrown from the track
05:24to determine the amount of wind speed and force it would have taken to move that train car the distance
05:31that it actually was observed to move,
05:34knowing the weight of the train car.
05:36So that process yielded an answer that suggested wind speeds were greater than 200 miles per hour, or the EF5
05:44cutoff.
05:45Researchers brought this information back to the National Weather Service and said,
05:49hey, we have good reason to believe this tornado was stronger than an EF4, and we would like you to
05:56consider our evidence.
05:57The same thing is happening with this Enid case.
06:00Three different types of information are being considered to try to influence the National Weather Service,
06:07who ultimately makes the decisions on what the damage survey rating is officially going to be.
06:14Now, in this case, the National Weather Service of Norman is also co-located with people who were doing this
06:20analysis in the first place,
06:21and I would be very surprised if they did not upgrade this, given the evidence that has been shown.
06:27So I would expect the NWS to come out with a formal statement noting and acknowledging this tornado
06:35and the change of intensity associated with it to EF5.
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