Demonstrating a Future Application of the Wind Speed Estimation Standard to Tornadoes

The American Society for Civil Engineers/American Meteorological Society Wind Speed Estimation committee (WSE) is well on its way to producing a standard for estimating wind speeds in severe storms. At the same time the NWS is updating StormData to take advantage of the additional information to be provided by the standard. Thus it’s time to provide a few scenarios for how the paradigm of wind speed estimation will change in post-storm investigations. We provide these scenarios understanding that the remaining internal, and future public, balloting may change the final content within the standard. However, for the time being, we consider where we can apply the standard to provide improved estimates of the winds in a tornado than available now, from a variety of different methods. We demonstrate how the standard can be leveraged to provide more information on tornado intensity for users in scenarios involving: a tornado in a rural area over agricultural plots, a tornado over primarily forested land, and a tornado over a populated area having a wide range of construction codes and practices, including when damage-based, in-situ and/or radar measurements may be available.