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Hurricanes vs tornadoes essay
Tornado and hurricane similarities
Tornado and hurricane similarities
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Recommended: Hurricanes vs tornadoes essay
There are a lot of people dying each year in the U.S by Hurricanes and Tornadoes. I am writing this essay to tell the people which is worse a Hurricane or a Tornado. People should know which is worse. Just think about it you can see tornadoes from far distance, so you have time to run away, but on hurricanes you kind of can’t. Stay tuned to find out which is worse. According to, source 2. There are more Tornadoes hitting the U.S than Hurricanes. Most tornadoes usually hit a Texas. Tornadoes are made up of clouds and wind. Tornadoes usually always happen on flat land because flat land has no hills. A cool fact about tornadoes is that it can catch on fire for a few seconds. I forgot to mention, tornadoes are also made up of dust.
How are tornadoes created? Tornadoes are the result of an extremely large storm called a supercell. A supercell is a storm that has the presence of a mesocyclone. A mesocyclone possesses a deep, persistently rotating updraft. These storms are also referred to as rotating thunderstorms. There are five classifications of thunderstorms: supercell, squall line, multi-cell, and single-cell.
The 1953 Waco Tornado was the deadliest tornado in Texas since 1900. The violent and deadly twister ripped through the downtown area killing and injuring hundreds. 600 homes were destroyed and 5 people were hit and killed in cars.Injured people were 597 and 114 killed.
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 are “violent windstorms that take the form of a rotating column of air or vortex that extends downward from a cumulonimbus cloud” as Tarbuck and Lutgens (2012) explain.
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?
What is a tornado? A tornado is “a rapidly rotating vortex or funnel of air extending groundward from a cumulonimbus cloud.” (Haddow et al) Tornadoes produce destructive winds that can destroy everything that comes in its path. Meteorologists use the speed of the winds to classify the strength of tornadoes on the Fujita-Pearson scale. The weakest tornadoes, F0, have wind speeds from 65-85 miles per hour, all the way to an F5 tornado, with winds in excess of 200 miles per hour.
Tornadoes are devastating atmospheric events that affect the ecology and the lives of people in their paths. Tornadoes are defined as “a violently rotating column of air, in contact with the ground, either pendant from a cumuliform cloud or underneath a cumuliform cloud, and often (but not always) visible as a funnel cloud” (Glossary of Meteorology, 2011). The Tri-state tornado was the deadliest tornado in the United States. It stayed on the ground for a total of 219 miles through areas of Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana, killed a total of 695 people, and an estimated $16.5 million in damages (National Weather Service, 2011). Luckily, the tornado’s path was largely rural farmland with scattered small towns between them.
Tornadoes are powerful and destructive phenomena created in strong thunderstorms. Tornadoes are most common in the United States, and in the U.S., they are common in an area called Tornado Alley. Every year, tornadoes wreak havoc on the countryside, towns, and even cities. The deadliest tornado in U.S. history crossed over three states, destroyed 15,000 homes, and killed almost 700 people. There are only a couple of people on record that claim to have been in and seen the center of a tornado and lived. Tornadoes even have their own rating scale, based on their wind and damage level.Tornadoes are powerful vortexes created in thunderstorms, are common in the U.S., have its own rating scale, have only been seen on the inside a few times, have the potential to demolish towns, and can take lives.
Hurricanes are formed over tropical waters. These intense storms consist of winds over 74 miles per hour (Ahrens & Sampson, 2011). The storms addressed here are Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Sandy. This paper will explore the contrasts and comparisons between these two horrific storms.
A hurricane is easily the most powerful storm that mother-nature can throw at us. Every year people who live on the coasts fight hurricanes with no dismay. A hurricane is simply too strong. Their winds reach speeds of 75 mph. The winds around the eye wall can reach 130 to 150 mph. They are 200 to 300 miles in diameter. The number of casualties is endless, as well as the widespread destruction that takes millions of dollars to repair. Even if the hurricane doesn’t cause a lot of damage, the storm surge will. Storm surge is the great tidal waves that crash into our coasts and make huge floods that are caused by hurricanes.
Hurricanes are powerful and destructive storms that involve great rain and wind. The United States of America has dealt with many hurricanes that have cost a great amount of damage. However, there is one hurricane that happened in 2005 that stands out among the others, Hurricane Katrina. Hurricane Katrina was one of the worst hurricanes to hit the United States, a category 5 on the Saffir/Simpson Hurricane Scale. An estimated 1836 people died because of the hurricane and the floodings that happened after (Zimmermann 1). Katrina initially beg...
Next Tornados tend to destroy everything while hurricanes are flood everything. Furthermore, tornados are filled with are thus being air storms while hurricanes are filled with water, thus becoming a water storm. Tornados also differ from hurricanes in carrying capabilities, tornados mostly carry anything they pick up and hurricanes are filled with water, so they can't pick up much. Lastly, on average hurricanes appear once every 2.5 years in the U.S. while tornados appear 1,300 times each year on
Hurricanes are one of the deadliest and most expensive natural disasters around. They are more common in areas of humid yet moist weather so they are very foreign to certain places. But to the places were hurricanes are the norm, the people take them extremely seriously because they kill people and ruin countless amounts of property. Hurricanes can attack and harm people in so many ways they can kill people, leave them homeless, it leaves children orphaned and disable them. On the west coast of the United States and other places hurricanes aren’t taken as seriously as other more common disasters, such as, earthquakes and volcanoes yet the hurricane can be a lot more damaging that both of those. Hurricanes are cyclones that develop over warm oceans and breed winds that blow yup to 74 miles per hour.
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 tornado is defined as a violently rotating column extending from a thunderstorm to the ground. The most violent tornadoes are capable of tremendous destruction with wind speeds of two hundred and fifty miles per hour or more. Damage paths can be more than one mile wide and fifty miles long. In an average year, eight hundred tornadoes are reported nationwide, resulting in eighty deaths and over one thousand five hundred injuries. In the body of my essay, I will tell you about types of tornadoes, where tornadoes come from, where and when tornadoes occur, the damage they inflict, variations of tornadoes, and how to detect tornadoes.