tornado

     

A tornao is a violently rotating column of air which is in contact with both the surface of the earth and a cumulonimbus cloud or, in rare cases, the base of a cumulus cloud. Tornadoes come in many sizes but are typically in the form of a visible condensation funnel, whose narrow end touches the earth and is often encircled by a cloud of debris.

Trivia about tornado

  • With a funnel more than a mile wide, one of the largest of these occured March 18, 1925 & killed 695 people
  • On April 27, 2011 a mile-wide one of these devastated Tuscaloosa, Alabama
  • Before it first touches down on the ground, its funnel looks white, as it's just made up of water droplets
  • The first documented successful forecast of this was by 2 Air Force officers in 1948 in Oklahoma
  • Julia Keller won in 2005 for her reporting on a 10-second event: the destruction of Utica, Illinois by this
  • In June 1953 one of these fatally touched down in Worcester, Massachusetts, far from the Midwest
  • Twister is an informal term for this type of windstorm
  • Residents of Greensburg, Kansas had about 20 minutes warning before one of these destroyed their town in 2007
  • The Fujita scale that ranks the intensity of these goes from F-0 on up; an F-5 has wind speeds exceeding 261 mph
  • Its winds can reach 400 MPH
  • On March 18, 1925 the most violent single one of these in U.S. history swept through Mo., Ill., & Ind., killing 695