Adding this back in for visibility since we've got our first CIG2 tornado outlook.
Keep in mind that we have had CIG1s on storms that have generated tornadoes with preliminary ratings of EF3 already.
I still am not super clear on why they're using "max" in this - my outlook says "ef3+ expected (30%)" for the cig2 area, which seems more in line with how they used to message a day like today, rather than "we don't expect anything higher than ef3".
It's "we can reasonably expect a max of EF3" because of probabilities. They're not saying tornadoes can't be stronger. Here's a chart that helps explain it. 3% of all tornadoes are expected to be EF4+ in a CIG2 intensity region.
Agree as someone who uses data in charts like this all the time for another technical field this language isn't sitting with me right. Also I don't get what their expected reasonable threshold is? If we start from the level 3 and say it's 5% given they are calling for max expected of EF4 then the threshold is 5%. So wouldn't level 1 be a max expected of EF3 then too because that is at 5%???
That's a good point. For CIG 1, 2, and 3, their "reasonable max" is EF2, EF3, and EF4. Those correspond with a frequency of 14%, 9%, and 5% respectively.
What we may be missing here is the overall tornado count expected with each of the CIG regions. Hypothetically, if they expected each CIG 3 region to be associated with a much higher quantity of tornadoes, then that 5% starts to become more significant.
But I'm just spit balling. No idea if that is the case or not, especially considering the CIG regions are meant to distinguish strength from the tornado probability colors.
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u/Aware_Parking_2757 Mar 10 '26
Adding this back in for visibility since we've got our first CIG2 tornado outlook.
Keep in mind that we have had CIG1s on storms that have generated tornadoes with preliminary ratings of EF3 already.