Do you know where tornadoes and tornadoes come from?

Tornadoes are powerful atmospheric whirlwinds that have the shape of a funnel reaching the earth's surface. And they are one of the most destructive yet impressive natural phenomena on our planet.

IN meteorology tornadoes (from the old Russian “smurch” - “cloud, black cloud”) are vortices that have formed over by sea. And those that arise over land are blood clots (from the Italian tromba - "pipe"), or tornadoes (from the Spanish tornar - "twist, twist"). But non-specialists in most cases use these terms as synonyms.

Those who saw a tornado are unlikely to be able to forget this. Vortex revolves with great speed - about 400 km / h. And he can literally plow a clearing 1.5 km wide and 100 km long, destroying everything in its path.

It is not uncommon for a tornado to turn the sky dark green. It is also accompanied by thickening thunderclouds and baseball-sized hail.

This phenomenon can be found all over the world. Most often, such tornadoes form in North America due to the geographical features of this continent. In the so-called Tornado Alley - in a region that includes the territory of the states of South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, northern Texas and eastern Colorado - eddies

annually claim the lives of 80 people and cause more than 1,500 injuries.

In addition, tornadoes are not uncommon in Europe, Russia (with the exception of northern regions), Argentina, South Africa, in the west and east of Australia - in general, wherever there are collisions of atmospheric fronts.

How do tornadoes form? In fact, scientists themselves have not fully figured it out, but the overall picture looks something like this. The most powerful funnel vortices are born in large thunderclouds in which strong winds rotate. Such a cloud is called a supercell, and about one in a thousand thunderstorms becomes it. And every fifth or sixth of them generates a tornado.

The reason for the occurrence of a tornado is the difference in temperature and humidity at different heights of the supercell.

When rising warm and humid air collides with falling cold and dry air, convection occurs - the transfer of heat by wind currents.

As a thundercloud moves, a rotating updraught called a mesocyclone draws in more and more warm air and increases the speed of its rotation. Water droplets form from it, creating a funnel cloud. It continues to grow and finally touches landturning into a tornado.

But meteorologists have not yet been able to describe the process more accurately. The fact is that it is very problematic to assess the physical characteristics of a tornado, and therefore scientists are limited to approximate calculations. The reason is banal: near a powerful tornado, meteorological instruments simply break down from a place and fly away in an unknown direction. And this, as you understand, makes research a little more difficult.

Therefore, the power of the tornado accepted measured not by the speed of the wind in it, but by the amount of destruction caused by it. There is a Fujita-Pearson scale, which includes six categories - from F0 to F5. F0 is low damage (damaged pipes and broken windows), while F5 is devastating: buildings demolished from their foundations, trees uprooted, and cars abandoned in the next block.