If you’re any kind of weather enthusiast at all, you’ve likely heard that the Enderlin, North Dakota from the late evening of June 20, 2025 was officially upgraded to an EF5 rating as of this Monday morning. That information was released from the Grand Forks, ND local office of the National Weather Service and was part of several months of additional surveying, mathematical analysis, and damage reconstruction analysis from the Grand Forks office in conjunction with multiple top wind engineering and tornado survey experts and even the Northern Tornadoes Project team at Western University’s Canadian Severe Storms Laboratory. The tornado, based on mathematical analysis of damage and physical movement it did to loaded rail cars, was estimated to have had winds over 210 mph (the mathematical analysis suggested as high as 266 mph or greater, actually). The tornado was on the ground for just over 12 miles, peaked in width and just over 1 mile wide, and was responsible for 3 fatalities. Detailed information on the survey can be found here from the NWS Grand Forks, ND office: https://www.weather.gov/media/fgf/Enderlin.pdf
This makes the tornado a historic one in the sense that this is the first tornado in the United States in 12 years that has officially been rated EF5. The last one was the deadly Moore, Oklahoma tornado on May 20, 2013. Above is a list of all the tornadoes in the U.S. that have been officially rated as F5/EF5 in the last 30 years. Counting the Enderlin, ND tornado, there have been a total of 15 tornadoes to be given this highest designation. Of the 15 in total, six of them were in 2011 alone with four of those six happening on April 27, 2011.
The Deep South and “Dixie Alley” is certainly no stranger to tornadoes of this intensity. As a matter of fact, of the 60 tornadoes to be rated F5/EF5 in the United States from 1950 to present day, nine of them directly affected the state of Alabama, making it the state with the most F5/EF5 tornadoes officially on record since 1950. There is some question over the March 3, 1966 tornado and whether it is counted in the Alabama F5/EF5 tracks because of conflicting reports of the degree of damage it caused in Alabama and whether it was one tornado or a family of them across Mississippi and Alabama. However, even if you DON’T count that tornado, Alabama STILL ties for first place against Oklahoma in having the most F5/EF5 tornadoes since 1950. Our local viewing area here at Tennessee Valley Weather was directly impacted by two of the listed F5/EF5 tornadoes above from the past 30 years… the Hackleburg / Phil Campbell, AL EF5 of April 27, 2011 and the “Forgotten F5” of April 16, 1998. All of this just hammers home the point that “Dixie Alley” is just as violent and dangerous as traditional “Tornado Alley”.
The Enhanced Fujita Scale is the tornado rating scale that ranks a tornado between EF0 (lowest) to EF5 (highest) based on the intensity of the damage it causes. It was put into place in early 2007 as a more detailed replacement to the original Fujita Scale. There is a common misconception that, while the Enhanced Fujita Scale only looks at damage, the original Fujita Scale is better because it used wind speeds. The truth is that even the original Fujita Scale ratings were based on damage, and the wind speeds given were estimates based on the damage surveyed. It has always been that way, even when Dr. Fujita surveyed the tornadoes himself! The wind speeds have ALWAYS been an afterward estimate. What changed from the older scale to the current one is a more detailed and thorough breakdown in the degree of damage to different types of homes, commercial buildings, power lines, trees, etc., etc., and what ended up being a lowered estimate of the wind speeds needed to do the damage in those rating levels. For instance, on the original scale, an F4 tornado was estimated to have maximum wind gusts between 207 and 260 mph. Through detailed wind engineering analysis, experts found that objects and structures fail to the point of EF4-level damage at wind gusts between 166 and 200 mph instead.
There has been plenty of controversy over tornado ratings since 2013, and if you’re a weather enthusiast, you know those talked about tornadoes quite well! At the top of the list is the infamous El Reno, Oklahoma tornado of May 31, 2013. Originally rated EF5 by the Norman, Oklahoma NWS office, that rating was overruled at the national HQ level of the NWS because it was based on wind speed observations from mobile Doppler Radar instead of damage. That caused the tornado to be forced into a downgrade to an EF3 rating. This is because the Enhanced Fujita Scale is a damage-based scale. We, along with many in the meteorology community, feel that mobile observations and other datapoints need to be included into the process when they are available. Other likely greater than EF4 intensity tornadoes have missed out on having a higher rating in recent years because of the reluctance to use contextual evidence as a basis for a higher rating. With this Enderlin, ND tornado and its rating being based around contextual evidence of the lofted and thrown train cars and the mathematically calculated wind speeds needed to do that, and then the specific type of debarking done to the trees, it is possible that the rating process is starting to shift more in the direction to allow things like this to be correctly included in the tornado damage rating process. As a matter of fact, there is a forthcoming update to the Enhanced Fujita Scale soon that is slated to include more damage points for structures and the addition of contextual evidence, things that will make EF5 level ratings for tornadoes a good bit less impossible (and correctly so) than what has happened since 2013.
