Many of us have more than once watched on TV messages about a natural disaster that struck the United States: a huge tornado pillar, dragging in and sweeping away everything in its path. For this country, such natural phenomena can be said to be a real national disaster. For Russia, on the contrary, a tornado is a rather rare phenomenon. What is a tornado?
Instructions
Step 1
The encyclopedic dictionary gives the following definition: "a tornado is an atmospheric vortex that arises in a thundercloud and spreads down, often to the very surface of the Earth", which has "the form of a column with funnel-shaped expansions from above and below." By the way, the diameter of the pillar can range from tens to hundreds of meters.
Step 2
In Europe, tornadoes are called blood clots, which in French means a pipe, and in America - a tornado (in Spanish "rotating").
Step 3
A tornado occurs when cold air descending from a thundercloud to the earth's surface collides with warm air rising upward, as a result of which a rotational air movement arises, forming a tornado funnel. Interestingly, in the southern hemisphere, the rotation of air in the tornado funnel occurs clockwise, and in the northern hemisphere, on the contrary, counterclockwise.
It should be noted that a tornado is a local phenomenon, it moves with the cloud, and, therefore, does not exist for long.
Step 4
The tornado draws in everything that comes in its path, and tears apart these objects due to the highly rarefied air. The destruction caused by a tornado is different and depends on its intensity, which, in turn, is determined by the speed of internal air flows. Usually it can reach from 18 to 140 meters per second. There are cases when a tornado lifted into the air and tore into parts multi-ton trucks, but at the same time left the chicken eggs transferred by it intact.
Step 5
Unlike the United States, where about a thousand tornadoes occur a year, tornadoes are quite rare in Russia. According to the head of the department of short-term forecast and dangerous weather phenomena of the Hydrometeorological Center A. Golubev, "they are observed mainly on the Black Sea coast, in particular, in the region of Anapa and Tuapse." Here are examples of large tornadoes that swept over the territory of Russia: tornado in Moscow in 1904; a tornado that passed along the outskirts of Ivanovo in 1984; tornado in Blagoveshchensk in 2011, which became the first, according to A. Golubev, "in Russian history, a tornado that passed through the territory of a large city with multi-storey buildings."
