The Best Tornado Photos

Tornadoes can happen anywhere in the world but I live in Tornado Alley in the upper Midwest of the United States. I instinctively know that if the air feels a certain way and the sky looks a certain color that a tornado is possible.

When I was a kid I was terrified of tornadoes. I couldn't even watch the Wizard of Oz tornado. At the same time I was fascinated by them and read whatever I could find to try and understand what they were and how they formed.

This fear stayed with me until my early twenties. After graduating from college I moved to the suburbs of St. Louis, Missouri. One day I was at the grocery store after work. When I went into the store it was sunny. By the time I got to the check out line it was black as night. I was tired from work and just wanted to get home to my apartment so I went out in the rain and darkness to my car. At that point the tornado sirens started going off. I looked at the black clouds, then back at the store with it's glass windows and decided there really wasn't any safe place to go. Not like back home in Iowa where just about everybody has a basement to escape to. I got in my car and started driving back to the apartment which, again, didn't really feel safe to me. At that moment I let go of the fear. I decided fate was beyond my control and there wasn't any point in trying to protect myself from it. A feeling of peace came over me and by the time I got home 10 minutes later, most of the storm had passed without incident.

Ever since then I have wanted to go storm chasing. When the Weather Channel first came into existence I would watch it for hours. I remember saying when I was working as a transcriptionist and using a word processor that I wished I could get radar on my monitor. My coworkers laughed at my imagination. Four years later we all had PCs and that dream was a reality. One night at work, in between typing medical reports, I watched the 1999 F5 tornado first become an angry red dot on the radar and slowly move east along I-44, taking aim on Oklahoma City. I knew that was a bad one from the get go.

Now I'm sure many people recognize a probable tornadic storm on the radar without thinking twice about it. And now I can get radar images on my phone! which still amazes me.

Image courtesy of Amir.J on Flickr.

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Dust devils do not need a big thunderstorm to form as a tornado does. They happen when air at the surface is hotter than the air above it. If the air above the surface is at a lower pressure, the hot air rapidly shoots skyward, pulling more hot air with it. If it starts to spin, the hot air it pulls in fuels it to grow taller.

Regular tornadoes are generally fueled by the instability caused by warm moist air meeting cold dry air. Dust devils spin up in dry conditions such as you find in the desert, the dryer the better.

Tornadoes start from the cloud base and come down. Dust devils start at the ground and go up.

They can spin up anywhere when the conditions are right. Like cold air funnels they rarely do damage.

Update: I was recently (September 2009) watching a TV program about the 2009 storm chase season by the team of scientists in the Vortex project. There was mention that they don't really know if tornadoes form from the cloud down or the ground up, so ideas about tornadoes are changing.

Image courtesy of bgwarsh on Flickr.