Tornado Essay

Words: 995
Pages: 4

A tornado is defined as a violently rotating column extending from a thunderstorm to the ground. The most violent tornadoes are capable of tremendous destruction with wind speeds of two hundred and fifty miles per hour or more. Damage paths can be more than one mile wide and fifty miles long. In an average year, eight hundred tornadoes are reported nationwide, resulting in eighty deaths and over one thousand five hundred injuries. In the body of my essay, I will tell you about types of tornadoes, where tornadoes come from, where and when tornadoes occur, the damage they inflict, variations of tornadoes, and how to detect tornadoes.
There are many types of tornadoes. The average tornado is usually split up into categories based on the
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Some variations of tornadoes are that they can be found in the early stages of rapidly developing thunderstorms. This type of tornado is most common along the range of the Rocky Mountains, the Plains, and the Western States. Tornadoes may appear nearly transparent until dust and debris are picked up. Occasionally, two or more tornadoes may occur at the same time.
Today, the development of Doppler radar has made it possible, under certain circumstances, to detect a tornado's winds with radar. However, human beings remain an important part of the system to detect tornadoes because not all of them occur in situations where radar can "see" them. In addition, ordinary citizen volunteers make up what is called SKYWARN (www.skywarn.org) network of storm spotters who work with their local communities to watch out for approaching tornadoes, so that those communities can take appropriate action in case of a tornado. Spotter information is relayed to the National Weather Service, which operates the Doppler radar's and which issues warnings, usually relayed to the public by radio and television, for communities ahead of the storms using all the information they can obtain from weather maps, modern weather radar's, storm spotters, monitoring power line breaks, and so on.
These are all important tornado facts and reasons of why this phenomenon occurs. Tornadoes are