At this time 1 year ago, the Enderlin, ND EF5 tornado touches down, and rapidly intensifies into EF5 strength, as several train hopper cars were derailed—with one of them being hurled 475ft away from it’s origin. #ndwx#wxtwitter
I see some criticism of NWS Wichita for the unwarned fatal tornado last night, but I just wanted to offer some perspective to the difficulties that come with warning QLCS tornadoes, and how quickly this happened last night. See the 3 radar frames attached -- the destroyed manufactured home is marked with a small red square marker.
The first frame shows one of many circulations along the squall line that could potentially be tornadic. In the first frame at 06:11:55z some circulation along the leading edge is evident, but not well organized, especially compared to earlier ones or even the one to the southeast.
At 06:15:01z the velocity signature has become extremely well organized and suddenly has a debris signature. To issue a warning at this point, they would have had to see the TDS, draw out the warning -- oops, time's up, the manufactured home is already destroyed. Even if a warning is very quickly issued, there is a reaction time delay for receivers to take action IF they even have a way to receive the warning at 1:15 AM (and another huge factor is IF they even take action, which is quite a major problem in itself).
In my opinion, there is certainly some valid criticism with regard to being conservative with issuing warnings (but this is always a difficult balance between underwarning and overwarning, especially with tornadic QLCS events). I've seen some criticism for the SVR's not being tornado tagged, but personally I believe that changes absolutely nothing about outcomes at 1:20 in the morning. Overall I feel like this was genuinely just an extremely unfortunate sequence and a really hard one to have warned with any useful lead time.
@HarbirSDhillon Nah its just that canadians are worth less ergo canadian likes are worth less. Learn how exchange rates work before making yourself look like a dumbass 🖕