A tornado is a violently spinning column of air that stretches down from a thunderstorm cloud to the ground. Inside a big thunderstorm, winds blowing at different speeds and heights can make the air start rolling like a tube, and then the storm tips that tube upright into a spinning funnel. When the funnel touches the ground — it's a tornado!
Tornadoes have the fastest winds on Earth — the strongest can spin at nearly 500 kilometres per hour! Scientists rate them on the Enhanced Fujita scale, from EF0 (light damage) to EF5 (incredible damage), mostly by looking at the destruction they leave behind.
An enormous F5 tornado touching down in Elie, Manitoba, Canada, in 2007. It was strong enough to pick up a house and throw it! See source ↓
🗺️ Where do tornadoes happen?
Tornadoes can happen almost anywhere, but the champion spot is Tornado Alley in the middle of the USA. There, warm damp air from the Gulf of Mexico crashes into cold dry air from Canada and dry desert air from the west — perfect tornado ingredients! The USA gets over 1,000 tornadoes every year.
📜 A bit of history
Before weather radar, people had almost no warning when a tornado was coming. In 1948, two Air Force officers noticed that storms on the new radar screens came with hook shapes — and made the first successful tornado forecast in history, saving an air base's planes just in time!
📚 Picture Sources
- Photo 1 — F5 tornado in Elie, Manitoba, Canada, 2007. From Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0): https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:F5_tornado_funnel_cloud_Elie_Manitoba_2007.jpg
