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1. Introduction
On the afternoon of 23 June 2016, a violent tornado rated EF4 (Xue et al. 2016; Zheng et al. 2016) on the enhanced Fujita (EF) scale (WSEC 2006) occurred in Funing County of Yancheng City, Jiangsu Province, China (Fig. 1). The tornado caused 98 fatalities and 846 injuries in Funing County. Around 3200 residences, two primary schools, and eight factory warehouses were destroyed. It was the first tornado to hit Yancheng on that day. Another tornado was spawned by the same supercell in Sheyang County of Yancheng City ~10 min after the demise of the first tornado (Fig. 1). This paper mainly focuses on the first tornado, hereinafter referred to as the Funing tornado.
The 23 June 2016 Funing EF4 tornado was the deadliest tornado recorded in the past 40 years in China (Table 1). Although tornado occurrence frequency in China is relatively low compared with the United States, it is rather significant for East Asia (Markowski and Richardson 2010). According to the tornado statistics calculated by Fan and Yu (2015), the annual average frequency of tornadoes in China was at least 60 during 2004-13, which was less frequent than the 250 tornadoes per year reported in Europe during 2006-10 (Antonescu et al. 2017) and the at least 1000 tornadoes identified each year in the United States. The highest frequency of tornadoes in China occurs in July, with a secondary peak in April. Among all the provinces, Jiangsu Province has the highest frequency of tornadoes of various intensities (Fan and Yu 2015). As shown in Table 1, two of the top-10 deadliest tornadoes ever recorded in China occurred in Yancheng, Jiangsu Province. Besides tornadoes, Jiangsu Province also has the highest frequency of mesoscale convective systems (MCSs) in China (Meng et al. 2013; He et al. 2017), suggesting that the region is climatologically favorable for convective environments that...