Logan Parham

A comment from NWS Grand Forks meteorologist-in-charge Mindy Beerends regarding the process to upgrade the Enderlin tornado to an EF5 rating, on today's WeatherBrains episode: "So we ended up having to go through meetings with the severe program leads, we had to go through meetings with the Storm Prediction Center, we had to go to meetings with the regional director, the COO, the deputy director, the weather service director, and we got approval from everybody." "We had to go through a meeting with all of central region and all of of southern region that had previous high-end tornadoes, that maybe questionable on whether or not we might look at past analyses and if anything may be re-rated, and kind of be prepared once we issue this rating." That’s an extensive, multi-level approval process just to assign a rating, especially the highest one on the scale. Setting construction quality aside, it does raise the question of whether this level of scrutiny and internal coordination could have been one of the contributing factors behind the 12-year EF5 drought.