Tornado Essay

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The strongest winds on this planet occur inside the tornadoes. Not all whirlpools in the
atmosphere are tornadoes. A funnel cloud that
drops for a period of time out of the clouds overhead, 
or a “dust devil” pirouetting across desert
sands under clear skies, are not tornadoes. The definition of a tornado
involves a vortex extending from
a thunderstorm and touching the ground.
In
tornado construction, the wind speed, humidity, 
temperature, and pressure arrange an unusually violent event that is always alluring and sometimes deadly. About 750 tornadoes strike the United States each year. 
Wind speeds in a tornado vortex are difficult to measure directly. Early efforts used video footage of debris carried in the vortex. By knowing the distances involved and the time between frames, one measured the speed. Today Doppler radar makes real-time wind-speed measurements achievable, especially with mobile Doppler units that can achieve good resolution if one can park the truck adequately close to the action. While the wreckage that tornadoes produce is ugly, an organized aspect in nature, which quickly produces high- entropy disorder, they are amazing and beautiful in their physics. Their complexity emerges from out-of-equilibrium thermodynamics in a multiphase fluid. The weather in general forms a nonlinear system—recall that “chaos theory” and the “butterfly effect” beginfrom the study of meteorology.
Tornadoes are commonly spawned in thunderstorms. The most creative tornado nurseries are the county-size thunderstorms called “supercells.” Thunderstorms evolve through three phases. During the first “cumulus” stage, a warm bubble of air is lifted upward. The lifting can begin when air flows up the side of a mountain or hitches a ride f...

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...e as the ambient horizontal winds push the supercell along. The vortex continues to move away until its inflow gets cut off. For examples, if a heavy rain begins to fall, the circulation wraps the mesocyclone and its tornado in a revolving curtain of downpour. The tornado becomes rain-wrapped which causes the inflow of warm moist air to slowly dampen and eventually the tornado dissipates.
The creating of a tornado is filled with physics. The variations in the temperature and the density of the air, wind conditions, velocity moisture content, barometric pressure, and the rotation of the earth itself, all play an important role in the development of not only tornados, but hurricanes too. In this day and age of an increasing number of tornados, now also moderately associated to global warming, it is quite easy to forget that it is very common sense, physics and facts.

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