Dr Masters reports: Largest Tornado on Record: the May 31 El Reno, OK EF-5 Tornado

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, Oklahoma 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 vorticies 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 as speeds of up to 185 mph towards them as the tornado rapidly expanded into the largest on record.

What they discovered is that as well as the central tornado, there were several ‘satellite vortices’, like mini-tornadoes, on the edge of the core tornado’s wind field. The vortices were moving around the edge of the tornado at speed of the wind, 185mph, and adding their spinning speed to produce the observed wind speed of 295mph at ground level.

The storm chasers could outrun a normal tornado, but they didn’t have a prayer of getting away from the voriteces coming at them at nearly 200mph.

The current death toll is 18.