Jeff Masters: EF-5 El Reno, OK, tornado was 2.6 miles wide, with wind speeds of up to 295 mph

by Jeff Masters, wunderblog, June 4, 2013

The largest tornado in recorded history was Friday's May 31, 2013, EF-5 tornado in El Reno, Oklahoma, the National Weather Service in Norman, OK, announced on Tuesday. The EF-5 re-classification was based upon Doppler radar data taken by Oklahoma University's mobile RaXPol radar. 

According to comments made by tornado researcher Rick Smith at a press conference today, the mobile radar was positioned on top of an overpass, and recorded winds close to the surface of up to 295 mph in satellite suction vortices that orbited the large, main vortex. The large, main vortex had EF-4 winds of 185 mph, and the satellite suction vortices moved across the fields at that speed, and rotated on their own at speeds of up to 110 mph, giving a combined wind speed of up to 295 mph in some of the satellite vortices. It's no wonder that so many storm chasers got in trouble with this tornado, since these suction vortices moved at speeds of up to 185 mph towards them as the tornado rapidly expanded into the largest on record. 

The tornado killed tornado scientist Tim Samaras and his two chase partners, Paul Samaras and Carl Young, and also killed an amateur storm chaser, Richard Charles Henderson. 

The 295 mph winds of the El Reno tornado rank second only to the world-record 302 mph (130 m/s) winds recorded in the Moore, OK, tornado of May 3, 1999. However, the Moore tornado's winds were measured at an altitude of 105 feet (32 meters), so the winds near the surface may have been higher in the El Reno tornado.


Figure 1. Path of the May 31, 2013, El Reno, OK, tornado from the National Weather Service in Norman, OK. Note how the tornado began moving directly down I-40 as it headed towards Oklahoma City; had the tornado maintained its EF-5 strength and moved down I-40 into Oklahoma City, where traffic was bumper-to-bumper due to people trying to flee, the greatest tornado disaster in U.S. history would have resulted.

Video 1. The May 31, 2013, El Reno, OK, EF-5 tornado as filmed by storm chasers Justin Hoyt and Stephen Barabas, another team of chasers that were in extreme danger from the tornado. Their description: "The LONGER, INCREDIBLE WAY TOO CLOSE video of the multivortex tornado near El Reno, Oklahoma, on May 31st. This beast quickly turned onto us and grew into an over 2.6 mile wedge, the largest on record. After the easy escape from the multivortex, we ended up dropping south right into the damage path of the monster, getting caught up in its outer circulation. The dangerous aspect was that chasers were positioned all over the road and backed up in a panic instead of immediately turning around." Warning: foul language, including one F-bomb. A more detailed account of the chase is here.

Previous record largest tornado: 2.5 miles in diameter
The previous official record for the widest tornado belonged to the EF-4 Wilber-Hallam, Nebraska, tornado on May 22, 2004, which had a damage path up to 2.5 miles wide. However, NOAA's Storm Data publication documents that the EF-3 Edmonson, TX, tornado of May 31, 1968, had a damage path width between 2 and 3 miles (3.2 and 4.8 km) wide. In addition, Doppler radar measurements indicate that the May 4, 1999, Mulhall, OK, EF-4 tornado -- which thankfully passed mostly over farmland -- would have caused damage over a path 4 miles wide at its peak size, had it encountered a built-up area. 


Figure 2. Damage swath of the Wilber-Hallam, Nebraska, EF-4 tornado of May 22, 2004, was up to 2.5 miles wide, making it one of the largest tornadoes on record.

Wunderground has large 2-Mb animations of the high-resolution radar reflectivity and Doppler velocity Level II radar data, with the damage path of the May 31, 2013, El Reno tornado overlaid.

http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=2426

Read More

Taxpayers Billed Nearly $100 Billion for Extreme Weather in 2012

by Dan Lashof, Natural Resources Defense Council, May 14, 2013

With all the debate on the federal budget in Congress, climate change rarely gets mentioned as a deficit driver. Yet dealing with climate disruption was one of the largest non-defense discretionary budget items in 2012. Indeed, as the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) shows in Who Pays for Climate Change?, when all federal spending on last year’s droughts, storms, floods, and forest fires are added up, the U.S. Climate Disruption Budget was nearly $100 billion, equivalent to 16 percent of total non-defense discretionary spending in the federal budget—larger than any official spending category.

That means that federal spending to deal with extreme weather made worse by climate change far exceeded total spending aimed at solving the problem. In fact, it was eight times the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s total budget and eight times total spending on energy.

Overall the insurance industry estimates that 2012 was the second costliest year in U.S. history for climate-related disasters, with more than $139 billion in damages. But private insurers themselves only covered about 25% of these costs ($33 billion), leaving the federal government and its public insurance enterprises to pay for the majority of the remaining claims. As a result, the U.S. government paid more than three times as much as private insurers did for climate-related disasters in 2012.

That reflects a major shift in liabilities with respect to climate change away from private insurers to public alternatives that began in earnest following the $72 billion hit the industry took in 2005 from hurricane Katrina.

Federal spending related to climate disruption falls into two major categories: storms and droughts.

Spending related to storms includes appropriated funds for the Federal Emergency Management Agency as well as emergency supplemental appropriations following major disasters, such as Superstorm Sandy. It also includes the National Flood Insurance Program, which is supposed to be self-supporting, but is increasingly under water.

Drought-related spending includes the federal crop insurance program as well as the government’s share of higher food costs.

The figure below shows how the federal climate disruption budget breaks down.

While some of these federal programs—such as forest fire prevention, crop insurance, flood coverage and disaster preparedness—offer wider benefits to the country, it should be noted that these liabilities have largely been assumed by the public sector due to a lack of private sector alternatives. The true scorekeepers of climate risk—the insurance industry—realizes it can’t win when the dice are increasingly loaded with carbon pollution, so it’s walking away from the table, leaving taxpayers holding the bag. Last year that cost amounted to over $1100 per taxpayer, and we can expect to see even higher costs in future as carbon dioxide concentrations continue to soar past 400 parts per million.

Even as the budget to clean up climate disruptions hit a record high in 2012 and is expected to continue to grow, the budget for programs to fight climate disruption—such as environmental enforcement, energy efficiency, clean energy vehicle research and the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy—suffered cuts of more than $100 million the “sequester” that went into effect in March and remain under continued pressure from the budget-cutting process.

Our climate plan is, in effect, to cut critical investments now for the sake of small short-term deficit reductions and send our children the tax bills to clean up the mess.

That’s colossally short-sighted, even by Washington’s standards. 

http://ecowatch.com/2013/taxpayers-billed-100-billion-extreme-weather-2012/

Read More