You and I talked a few weeks ago about how Oklahoma and the nation is currently experiencing the longest EF5 tornado drought on record. Clearly nobody is complaining about it, but it is curious and science thinks it has an answer.
Of course, the elephant in the room is climate change, but this phenomenon isn’t being attributed to that—like, at all. Some people think climate change is pushing Tornado Alley Eastward, and while they complain about it, Okies are OK with that, too. We’ve had enough big twisters for the next few decades.
Instead, meteorologists are pointing to the same thing that made the ultra-rare F6 a thing of the past. Techinically, F6 is the EF5… and the EF5 status these day is reserved for only the worst storms imaginable. For a lack of better words, EF4 is the new F5.
It’s all about the F-Scale.
Back when Ted Fujita came up with the original Fujita Scale to measure tornadoes, there were definitions from F0 up to F12 tornadoes. It’s crazy to think what an F12 twister could do, but at the time they didn’t really know what was happening in a nader…