A tornado (or tornado) is a vortex in the atmosphere, developing inside a cumulus cloud, and gradually descending to the ground in the form of a column up to 400 m wide at the base. In some cases, its diameter on land can reach up to 3 km, and on water, this value is usually no more than 30 m.
The inner and outer parts of the tornado have a huge difference in pressure - it can be so large that objects falling inside (including houses) are simply torn apart. This area of highly discharged air, just like in a syringe, when you pull the plunger, due to which water, sand and other various objects are sucked into the vortex, which sometimes are scattered or carried over very long distances.
Why does a tornado occur and what is it?
The reasons for the appearance of the tornado have not been reliably established. However, it is believed that tornadoes occur when warm, humid air comes into contact with a cold, dry “dome” that has arisen over cold areas of land or ocean. On contact, heat is released, after which the heated air rises upward, which creates a rarefaction region.
Warm air from the cloud and the underlying cold air are drawn into this zone, as a result, significant energy is released and a funnel is formed. According to some estimates, the speed of air movement in it can reach 1300 km / h, while the vortex itself moves on average at a speed of 20 to 60 km / h.
Types of tornado
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• The most common are considered whip-like, thin and smooth, similar in appearance to a whip or whip
• Aquatic - formed above the surface of oceans, seas, in rare cases lakes
• Earthen - this is a rarity, formed during destructive cataclysms or landslides
• Snowy - tornadoes formed during a severe blizzard
• Less often you can find vague, similar to thick clouds near the ground, and composite, which consist of two or three vortices
• Fiery. During volcanic eruptions, as a result of a strong fire, it is often possible to observe fire tornadoes spreading the fire for tens of kilometers
• In deserts there are some kind of analogs of tornadoes - dusty or sandy whirlwinds, but usually their diameter does not exceed 3 meters
What's inside a tornado? Scientists' opinion
Tornadoes remain a poorly understood phenomenon to this day, but scientists believe that in the center of the tornado there is an area of reduced pressure, which prevents the outside air from filling the inside of the tornado. It is quite possible that there are vertical air currents inside, although such phenomena have not been reliably proven.
The suction force of the tornado can be explained by the high turbulence of the air column and the vertical component of the velocity, which rapidly changes during movement.
Tornado Fury
The weather has by no means lost its ability to sow fear in people's hearts. The most destructive means of war will seem insignificant before the terrible power of the wind. Hurricanes sweep through coastal regions, sweeping away everything in their path; tornado mangle the landscape. An unexpected gust of wind can throw the largest plane to the ground. With all the technologies available in our time, man is as dependent on the grace of angry winds as his distant ancestor. The weather is not only almost unpredictable, but also has an inexhaustible supply of tricks and surprises.
At the epicenter of a tornado. Eyewitness account
The rage of the tornado is so unexpected and immense that survivors are rarely able to recall the details of what happened. But on May 3, 1943, retired Army Captain Roy S. Hall was able to get out of the tornado's eye with his family and gave a clear description of the vortex that destroyed his home in McKinney, Texas, about 50 km north of Dallas.
With the onset of the storm, Hall locked his wife and children in the bedroom. And then the outer wall of the room with an eerie crash tumbled inward. However, the worst was yet to come. The shrill squeal of the wind suddenly died down. “It was exactly like this,” Hall wrote later, “as if my ears were covered with palms, cutting off all sounds except the unusually strong beats in my ears and head. I have never experienced such a feeling before. And in this icy silence, the shuddering house lit up with a mysterious blue glow.
In the same instant, Hall was thrown 10 feet, and he was under the rubble of the wall so suddenly that he could not remember how he got there. He got out from under the rubble, hugged his 4-year-old daughter and waited for his house, which was no longer supported by the foundation, to be carried away. And at that time a frightening vision appeared before him.
“Something in the beginning made an undulating movement from top to bottom, and then froze motionless, if you do not take into account the faint pulsation up and down,” Hall later wrote. - It was a curved face, concave facing me; its lower contour was located almost horizontally … It was the lower end of the tornado. At this time, we found ourselves in the tornado itself!"
Hall looked up. What he saw looked like an opaque, smooth wall about 4 meters thick, surrounding a columnar cavity. “It looked like the inside of an enamelled riser,” Hall recalled. “It extended more than 300 meters upward, swayed slightly and slowly curved to the southeast. Below, at the bottom, judging by the circle in front of me, the crater was about 50 m in diameter. Above, it expanded and, as you can see, was partially filled with a bright cloud that flickered like a fluorescent lamp. The spinning funnel swayed, and Hall saw that the entire column was as if made up of many huge rings, each of which moved independently of the others and caused a wave that ran from top to bottom. When the crest of each wave reached the bottom, the top of the funnel made a sound that sounded like the clicking of a whip.
Hall watched in horror as the top of a tornado touched a neighboring house and destroyed it. According to Hall, "the house seemed to dissolve, various parts of it were carried away to the left, like sparks from an emery wheel."
Soon the tornado continued its journey to the southeast. Hall's family managed to get out of the alteration virtually unscathed. At the cost of losing their home, they received from the "eye" of a violent storm a rare opportunity to look at the cruel riot of nature at the epicenter of its manifestations.
Atmospheric anomaly
For US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration pilots and scientists, flying into the “eye” (calm area) of a violent hurricane was part of their perilous job of tracking tropical storms. 1989, September 15 - The crew of NOAA-42, who flew in Hurricane Hugo from Antshi Islands to Charleston, South Carolina, fell more than they could even count on when their plane headed straight for the "eye" of a giant storm …
As soon as the plane pierced the wall of the "eye" just a few hundred feet from the calm center of the storm, violent forces fell upon the plane, threatening to tear it apart. One of the four engines failed, and the brave Orion began to fall. It managed to align and return to the "eye" when only 200 m remained to the sea surface. Later, analyzing this terrible adventure, scientists came to the conclusion that the plane flew into a bizarre atmospheric anomaly - a tornado, which could not be detected, because contrary to traditional meteorological concepts, he stayed in the wall of the "eye" of a large-scale storm and thus was able to mask his devilish power.
A tornado, in the whirling coils of which rushes the fiercest winds on our planet, can in an instant destroy everything that it touches. Over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries, more than a dozen times during the height of the day, the skies over New England grew black, and preachers prophesied that the end of the world was near. Fortunately, these so-called dark days were not harbingers of divine punishment, but a consequence of the vagaries of the weather.
Interesting Facts
Amazing incidents from the life of a tornado
Tornadoes became famous not only for cruelty, but also for eccentricities. Swirling winds, which can reach up to 200 miles per hour, can thrust a straw into a tree trunk and cause a piece of wood to punch through a steel sheet. Meanwhile, powerful internal vortices, hidden in the tornado, are apparently responsible for the fact that some objects are destroyed, while others remain unharmed. Ascending air currents can serve as a pillow: there have been cases when people took off into the air only to then gently land on the ground in the middle of a furious storm.
Some of these are:
• The tornado that destroyed the city of Xenia, Ohio in 1974, completely destroyed the farmer's house with everything in it, but spared two fragile objects: a mirror and a box with Christmas decorations.
• 1965, April 11 - Tornadoes swept across much of the Midwest of the United States. One of them in Cleveland, Ohio, lifted a teenager out of bed, carried out the window and landed, without any damage, on the other side of the street. At the same time, he remained wrapped in a blanket. Another tornado in Dunlop, Indiana, snatched an eight-month-old baby from a crumbling house and laid it on the ground nearby. In Grand Rapids, Michigan, a man was moved from his own veranda onto a pile of wood chips - all that was left of his neighbor's house.
• 1958, June 10 - In El Dorado, Kansas, a woman is thrown out of a window. She landed successfully 20 meters from the house. A gramophone record with the recording of the song "Bad Weather" fell next to her.
• 1955, May 25 - In Eudolla, Kansas, a powerful gust of wind yanked Fred Dye out of his shoes and threw him into a tree where he could sit out the storm. Not far from him, a husband and wife, leaving the bedroom that had ensured their safety, found that all the other rooms of the house had been taken away.
• 1944, June 23 - In West Virginia, a tornado quickly sucked the West Fork River dry.
• Shortly after a tornado swept through Illinois on March 18, 1925, a page from Literary Digest fell to the ground. It contained a photograph and description of a tornado of 1917.
• The surface of the water, for example, in the Yauza River and in the Lublin ponds, when the tornado passed, first boiled and boiled like in a cauldron, then the whirlwind sucked the water inside itself and the bottom of the reservoir and the river was exposed!
• The energy of an average tornado with a radius of one kilometer and an average speed of 250 km / h is equal to the energy of the world's first atomic bomb!
The most powerful and deadly tornadoes
• The strongest tornado was recorded in 1999 in Texas (USA), when a powerful crater swept across the ground at a speed of about 500 km / h and destroyed everything in its path.
• In terms of size, the largest tornado in 2013 in Oklahoma can be considered - it moved at a speed of 485 km / h and covered an area of about 4.2 km. In this whirlwind, one of the most famous "hunters" for tornadoes Tim Samaras died along with his son and friend Karl Young.
• The largest and most destructive tornado occurred on April 26, 1989 in the city of Shatursh (Bangladesh), as a result of which more than 1300 people died (it was included in the Guinness Book of Records as the most tragic).
• 1935, September 2 - during a tornado in Florida, the wind speed reached 500 km / h! This tornado killed 400 people and completely destroyed buildings in a strip 15–20 km wide.
• Among the largest water tornadoes: in the Gulf of Mas Sachusetts, the tornado reached a height of more than 1000 m, and in diameter at the parent cloud - 250 m, near the water, respectively, 70 m. The diameter of the cascade was 200 m, and the height was 150 m.