Originally posted by: shinerburke
I remember that night....scary as hell.....that damn thing popped up over OKC and stayed on the ground for nearly 5 hours. Actually made it all the way to us here in Tulsa but died out just before it hit the highly populated part of the city. There were multiple tornadoes that night but that one was a monster. They still talk about it on the news here all the time when tornadoes are out and about. In fact they said it was the most powerful tornado ever recorded and could have been greater than an F5 if the Fujita scale went higher.
Well the idea of the Moore tornado being the strongest is fairly unsubstantiated. There happened to be a mobile doppler near by that saw winds of 318+ and that would make it at the top of the F5 rating. The problem, however, is that no winds have ever been measured inside a tornado... only with doppler radar. Since no other tornadoes have had mobile doppler so close, erroneous reports have come out stating the Moore tornado was the strongest. There really is no way to compare wind speeds from storms because the Fujita scale can only guesstimate speeds. It is based on the appearance of damage, the quality of homes, size of structure, etc. I would say the Moore tornado is in the top 5 all time in the past 50 years.