What is a tornado and what determines its appearance?

2024 Author: Henry Conors | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-02-12 02:40

Fortunately, few of the inhabitants of our country know what a tornado is. Of course, we don't mean the little whirlwinds that sometimes occur in fields and deserted roads. We are talking about giant atmospheric vortices, which, as a rule, appear in a thundercloud and descend almost to the very earth's surface in the form of a trunk or cloud sleeve with a diameter of several tens or even hundreds of meters. Despite the fact that they do not exist for long, a lot of troubles can be expected from them. Let's take a closer look at what this phenomenon is.

What is a tornado?

Try to imagine a huge air funnel that has arisen due to the difference in pressure, which spins at an incredible speed and at the same time draws everything that is nearby into its center. In America, many people know firsthand what a tornado is. There, this phenomenon is called a tornado. There are also synonyms: meso-hurricane and thrombus,but they are used much less frequently. The rotation inside such a vortex is counterclockwise, just as it happens in cyclones that occur in the northern hemisphere of our planet.

Characteristics of the tornado

Vertically, one such funnel can reach ten, and vertically - fifty kilometers. The wind speed in it often exceeds 33 m/s. Talking about what a tornado is, it should be noted that it has incredible power. According to experts such as A. Yu. Gubar, S. A. Arseniev and V. N. Nikolaevsky, the energy of an average tornado with a radius of one kilometer and a speed of about 70 m / s is comparable to the energy of an atomic bomb tested by the United States in July 1945 in New Mexico. In their form, tornadoes are not only in the form of funnels. Sometimes a tornado resembles in its appearance a barrel, a cone, a glass, a whip-like rope, a column, devil's horns, an hourglass, etc. But most often it occurs in the form of a pipe, funnel or trunk that hangs from the parent cloud. Take a look at the tornado, the photo of which is presented below. Looks intimidating, doesn't it?

Sometimes the number of victims of such phenomena reaches several hundred people. The Tristate is considered the most terrible and famous tornado in the history of America. Having swept across three states (Missouri, Illinois, Indiana) on March 18, 1925, he took 747 human lives with him …

Where does a tornado appear and what causes it?

Tornados often form on tropospheric fronts, where the boundaries between air masses and differenttemperature, speed and air humidity. In the zone of collision of cold and warm fronts, the atmosphere is extremely unstable and contributes to the emergence of a tornado in the parent cloud, and below several smaller turbulent eddies. Most often this happens in the autumn and spring-summer period. For example, cold fronts separate dry, cold air from Canada from moist, warm air from the Atlantic Ocean or the Gulf of Mexico. Sometimes such a collision occurs over the sea surface, and then a sea tornado appears.

It can be almost completely transparent, and only from the lower part, dusty with water, one can guess about the danger threatening the ship. A tornado happens not only on Earth, but also on other planets of our system, for example, on Jupiter and Neptune. A tornado cannot appear on Mars due to low pressure and too rarefied atmosphere. But on Venus, the situation is just the opposite, and therefore the probability of tornadoes appearing there is very high.