For a while it hangs suspended in the sky. Suddenly, a twisting column of gray drops from the bottom of the cloud. Heavy, dark clouds hang low, dumping buckets of rain and hail. You want to take shelter in the part of the building that is most likely to stay up if the tornado comes over your head.Click here to download an 11x17 inch poster version of the 'What Causes a Tornado?' video!

We generally don’t have that in Australia but if you end up in a tornado, it’s basically a case of “duck and cover”.įind the most secure, reinforced part of the building - which is often the staircase, if the staircase is up against a wall. Residential houses tend to have a central shelter - sometimes in a cellar or under a staircase. In the US they have evacuation shelters in places such as toilets in malls or airports, which are reinforced with concrete. The role of climate change in eastern Australia's wild storms We need to rely on good planning and great spotters. It’s impossible for climate science to predict because they are such small size phenomena. Chris Stone / Subterrania / AAPīut in Australia and in the US, we only usually know when a tornado is coming toward the ground if tornado spotters report them.Ĭan we expect them to become more frequent with climate change? We’ve got no idea. It’s too early to say what the recent NSW tornado measured on the Enhanced Fujita scale because damage surveys are yet to be completed.Ī tornado in Melbourne in 2015. We have a magnitude scale for tornadoes called the Enhanced Fujita scale, which goes from 0-5 (where 5 is the biggest). Much like other types of natural hazards, tornadoes can be classified according to their impact. Most tornadoes occur in the mid afternoon to early evening. If the base of the funnel loses contact with the ground, it dies.

Or the opposite can happen - every house on the street is smashed but one.Įventually, tornadoes run out of energy. Tornadoes can go up a street and pick one house out on the street and reduce it to a pile of debris, leaving the other houses alone. Others can be much bigger and obviously if they touch down in a metropolitan area they can do a lot of damage very quickly - and they can behave very unpredictably. They might run for a few metres and then die. Some tornadoes touch down briefly and are quite narrow, perhaps just 20m across. That kind of tornado would cause monumental damage.Įxplainer: why are tornadoes so destructive? Most storms only last a few minutes, but in Tornado Alley in the US, there have been tornadoes up to 500m in diameter on the ground for four hours. How long they live on the ground and how far they travel influences the scale of damage. You sometimes see a tube coming out from a thundercloud and it’s only once it touches the ground that it’s a tornado.

Land of Tornadoes by Melanie S. Wolfe