Real World Monster: Tornado

Mythical monsters have been haunting our nightmares for millennia, instilling fear with their enormous sizes, malicious demeanor, and sheer destructive powers. For countless centuries, humankind has come up with these creatures to explain the mysteries of the world. A behemoth makes the ground quake with each step it takes. Charybdis of Greek mythology would open her giant mouth and suck down water from the sea and spit it back out three times a day, which created the tides, but also destroyed anything that became caught in the whirlpool that was created. The fiercest creatures tear apart homes, communities, and lives. Extremely few woes can equal these beasts of our imagination, except when the forces of nature are unleashed upon the world in the form of earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis, tornadoes, and volcanoes, the most destructive and widespread of which is the tornado.

A tornado is a violently rotating pillar of air that extends from a cumulonimbus cloud to the surface of the planet. They typically appear to be funnel-shaped, although they can be seen in a multitude of different sizes and shapes. While the majority of tornadoes have wind speeds of less than 112 miles per hour and are, on average, around 250 feet in diameter, the severest storms can peak at over 300 miles per hour and several miles wide. Oftentimes with average tornadoes, the twister is only in contact with the ground for a few miles, but the most intense of them can travel for more than 50 miles. Even though every continent on Earth, except Antarctica, has reported instances of these fearsome phenomena, the United States encounters the lion's share of them, usually in the region of the south east that has been dubbed "Tornado Alley".

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...relative to its size. While it is true that larger storms can affect a larger area because of their size, it doesn't mean that the wind speed is higher than the smaller ones. In fact, since 1950, over 100 of the EF4 rated tornadoes have been no wider than 300 feet. A third fable states that twisters are attracted to mobile homes and trailer parks. This is perpetuated by the news media because on the occasion that they are hit, the news tends to focus on them because, oftentimes, they are where the most casualties are due to the fact that such homes are not built to stand up to the ferocity of storms like more permanent structures are.

Works Cited

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tornado http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tornado_myths http://www.gods-and-monsters.com/charybdis.html http://www.ready.gov/tornadoes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tornado_intensity_and_damage