Tornado - a huge spinning funnel of sand and dust - is a unique natural phenomenon. For many years, scientists could not determine its nature, and only with the advent of ultra-high-speed video cameras it became possible to describe the process of the origin of tornadoes.
A tornado is a whirlwind that consists of air, dust, sand. All this mass rotates at a tremendous speed and rises from the earth to the cloud, connecting them to each other. Visually, a tornado is similar to a trunk.
Funnel formation
They say that there is no such point on Earth where a tornado could form, for many years of observations, scientists have fixed craters on all continents, in all climatic zones. Tornadoes can appear both over the sea and over land. They are especially common during hot and humid weather. Moreover, the presence of clouds is far from necessary, often the birth of tornadoes was observed with a clear sky, although thunderstorms and showers are satellites of the tornado.
In fact, a tornado is a pump that sucks in and lifts into the cloud various objects, sometimes very bulky. And carries them for many kilometers.
A tornado consists of a funnel (a vortex moving in a spiral) and walls (air inside the walls sometimes moves at a speed of up to 250 meters per second). It is in the walls that objects rise up, and sometimes animals caught up by a tornado.
The birth of the funnel has not been completely studied; it is believed that it arises during the collision of opposing fronts, some of which are wet and cold, and the second is dry and hot. One turns out to be heavier, it lies inside the future funnel, and the second is lighter, it envelops the lower one. As a result, the movement of less heated air masses from the periphery to the center is created, an inhomogeneous column is formed, which, due to the constant rotation of the globe, will also twist.
For the formation of a tornado, as a rule, a few minutes are enough. It is worth noting that it is also limited to minutes, but observers know cases when a tornado "lived" for several hours, inflicting a unique destructive blow.
The tornado's path is not unambiguous - from 20-40 meters to several hundred kilometers. Moreover, the presence of forests, lakes, hills and mountains on the way of the funnel is not an obstacle.
Anomaly and its behavior
Even jumping is characteristic of this natural anomaly: a tornado moves along the ground for some time, then rises into the air and flies without contact with the earth's surface. Then it touches the ground again, and it is at this moment that the most terrible destruction occurs. Not only small objects fall into the tornado, but also animals, cars, houses and even people.
In Russia, when observing tornadoes, areas and regions were identified in which their most frequent occurrence was recorded: the Volga region, the Urals, Siberia, as well as the coast of the Black, Azov and Baltic seas. It is worth noting that a tornado that has arisen at sea often passes to land, while only increasing its strength. On average, 20-30 tornadoes form in Russia over 10 years. Many of them have dire consequences. For example, a tornado that arose across Ivanovo destroyed more than 600 houses, 20 schools and kindergartens, 600 summer cottages, 20 people died, more than 500 were injured.
Despite the efforts of researchers of this phenomenon, it is almost impossible to predict the time and place of the appearance of the next tornado.
