The strongest winds on this planet occur inside the tornadoes. Not all whirlpools in the
atmosphere are tornadoes. A funnel cloud that
drops for a period of time out of the clouds overhead,
or a “dust devil” pirouetting across desert
sands under clear skies, are not tornadoes. The definition of a tornado
involves a vortex extending from
a thunderstorm and touching the ground.
In
tornado construction, the wind speed, humidity,
temperature, and pressure arrange an unusually violent event that is always alluring and sometimes deadly. About 750 tornadoes strike the United States each year.
Wind speeds in a tornado vortex are difficult to measure directly. Early efforts used video footage of debris carried in the vortex. By knowing the distances involved and the time between frames, one measured the speed. Today Doppler radar makes real-time wind-speed measurements achievable, especially with mobile Doppler units that can achieve good resolution if one can park the truck adequately close to the action. While the wreckage that tornadoes produce is ugly, an organized aspect in nature, which quickly produces high- entropy disorder, they are amazing and beautiful in their physics. Their complexity emerges from out-of-equilibrium thermodynamics in a multiphase fluid. The weather in general forms a nonlinear system—recall that “chaos theory” and the “butterfly effect” beginfrom the study of meteorology.
Tornadoes are commonly spawned in thunderstorms. The most creative tornado nurseries are the county-size thunderstorms called “supercells.” Thunderstorms evolve through three phases. During the first “cumulus” stage, a warm bubble of air is lifted upward. The lifting can begin when air flows up the side of a mountain or hitches a ride f...
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...e as the ambient horizontal winds push the supercell along. The vortex continues to move away until its inflow gets cut off. For examples, if a heavy rain begins to fall, the circulation wraps the mesocyclone and its tornado in a revolving curtain of downpour. The tornado becomes rain-wrapped which causes the inflow of warm moist air to slowly dampen and eventually the tornado dissipates.
The creating of a tornado is filled with physics. The variations in the temperature and the density of the air, wind conditions, velocity moisture content, barometric pressure, and the rotation of the earth itself, all play an important role in the development of not only tornados, but hurricanes too. In this day and age of an increasing number of tornados, now also moderately associated to global warming, it is quite easy to forget that it is very common sense, physics and facts.
Although the tornado of 10 June 1938 has been known about, at least anecdotally, within the scientific community since it was brought to light in 1939 by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, this potentially rich source of historic information has lain fallow. It is within this rich field of mobile, American thinking that we undertake this effort. A team of scientists with courage, brains, and even heart brought the resources to bear on the challenge.
According to Webster’s Dictionary, a tornado is a rotating column of air accompanied by a funnel shaped downward extension of a cumulonimbus cloud and having a vortex several hundred yards in diameter whirling destructively at speeds of up to three hundred miles per hour. There are six classifications of tornadoes, which are measured on what is known as the Fujita Scale. These tornadoes range from an F0 to an F5, which is the most devastating of all. Abnormal warm, humid, and oppressive weather usually precede the formation of a tornado. Records of American tornadoes date back to 1804 and have been known to occur in every state of the United States.
Tornadoes form from wind shears. Wind shears form from warm air that is found at ground level; when it’s raised, the updraft meets a down draft of cooler air that is moved in the opposite direction of the warm air. When both are pushed towards the Earth, this creates wind shear. A spinning tube of air, created from wind shear; tilts upward into a vertical position, as the updraft sucks up moisture from the ground and into the sky. As the warm air cools high in the sky; this produces condensation. The condensation then produces thunderclouds, which rise to 30,000+ feet. The spinning formations of air are then trapped and lifted into the thundercloud. This begins as swirling motion and as continued (if the winds remained viable), a supercell will form. Mesocyclones as they are known are a rotating cloud. If these rotating clouds run into humid air it will spi...
On May 20th, 2013 a EF 5 tornado hit Moore, Oklahoma and surrounding towns, with a path as wide as 1.3 miles wide (2.1 km) and had a wind speed, estimated at its peak, of 210 miles per hour (340 km/h). Killing 24 people, and injuring 377, this was one of the United States worst tornadoes in the past few years, along side the Joplin, Missouri tornado, in 2011. One of Mother Nature’s most dangerous and still very mysterious phenomenons averages about 1,200 reported each year, resulting in 80 deaths and injuring 1500. With very little known about them, especially whether or not they will form is one of the questions that plague meteorologist to this very day. What causes tornadoes, how does the tilt and gravity of the earth affect the winds to produce a tornado, and what will the future hold about our understanding of tornadoes?
As evening approached, several thunderstorms began to take on the characteristics of a supercell thunderstorm. Supercells, which are intense, broadly rotating thunderstorms, are the most v...
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)/National Climatic Data Center (NCDC), (2001). U.S. Tornado Climatology. Accessed on 9//27/2011 at http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/severeweather/tornadoes.html#deadly
1. According to the USA Today Tornado Information website, a tornado is a "violently rotating column of air in contact with the ground and pendant from a thunderstorm." Therefore, thunderstorms are the first step in the creation of a tornado.
A tornado occurs in very powerful thunderstorms, and usually it occurs in a super cell. A super cell is a type of storm that already has rotation inside of it, called a mesocycle. A tornado begins to form when a downdraft of air pulls the mesocycle down towards the ground. A funnel begins to form, and when the funnel cloud finally touches down, it officially becomes a tornado. As warm, moist air (the fuel of a tornado) is drawn into the tornado, it matures...
On May 22nd, 2011 a massive tornado hit Joplin, Missouri killing 162 people and injuring 1150. With wind speeds of 322km/h, the tornado made a total cost of over $2 billion for the city. 8000 structures were destroyed, 2000 of which were homes. Many people were left homeless. The tornado held an incredible EF5 rating on the Fujita scale, measured from the amount of destruction. The tragic event lasted 38 minutes, from 5:34 pm to 6:12pm. Cool wind from the Rockies in Canada and warm wind from the gulf of Mexico formed into a supercell thunderstorm creating a tornado in Kansas. The tornado rapidly moved into Joplin and continued on its 35 km path.
Many scientists often find themselves wondering if the tri-state tornado was really a single massive tornado or if it was part of a family of tornadoes that continuously evolve from one supercell to another. Only one factor stands in the way of this theory and that is a cyclical supercell usually has breaks in its destructive path. The tri-state tornado's path of damage appeared to be continuous despite two slight decreases in the destruction. One of which was near the onset of the storm, and one near the demise. No matter which is believed, one thing is for certain, and that is a storm like the tri-state tornado could very well happen again, but there is no telling when or where it may occur.
Tornadoes are one of the deadliest and most unpredictable villains mankind will ever face. There is no rhyme or reason, no rhythm to it’s madness. Tornados are one of the most terrifying natural events that occur, destroying homes and ending lives every year. April 29th, 1995, a calm, muggy, spring night I may never forget. Jason, a buddy I grew up with, just agreed to travel across state with me so we could visit a friend in Lubbock. Jason and I were admiring the beautiful blue bonnets, which traveled for miles like little blue birds flying close to the ground. The warm breeze brushed across the tips of the blue bonnets and allowed them to dance under the perfectly clear blue sky. In the distance, however, we could see darkness. A rumbling sky was quickly approaching.
Cyclone Tracy was category 3 hurricane and category 4 tropical cyclone that affected the city of Darwin on Christmas Eve to Christmas Day,1974 . Cyclone Tracy started of as a tropical depression in the Arafura sea. Tracy continued to develop into not only small but extremely intense tropical storm which later developed into a powerful cyclone (see figure 1.1).The hazard developed by two opposing winds meeting and developing a swirl over the tropical oceans. There was low pressure area that had developed in the middle of the swirl where the warm air is forced up (see figure 1.2). Due to this it caused a provision of energy for a Cyclone to form. To start a tropical cyclone the sea surface temperature generally needs to be above 26.5°C which
A tornado requires some basic ingredients to come together. First, energy in the form of warm, moist air must exist to feed thunder storms. Second, there must be a top layer of hot, dry air called a cap. This air acts like a lid on a simmering pot, holding in the warm air that’s accumulating in the atmosphere below until the storm’s ready to burst. Last, there has to be rotating winds speeding in oppositedirections at two different levels in the atmosphere, a phenomenon called wind shear, can cause the storms to rotate. Tornado alley is perfectly situated to meet these requirements. (1)
A tropical cyclone is a warm-core, low-pressure system producing high winds that spiral counter-clockwise (in the northern hemisphere) and inward, with the highest winds near the center of circulation. The large counter-clockwise and inward flow is characteristic of the nearly symmetric structure of tropical cyclones as they are comprised of rain bands spiraling toward the center. These warm-core storms typically form over the tropical and subtropical oceans and extract their energy from the heat content of the oceans.