Anyway, today is "Tornadoes Day," so I thought I would learn a little bit about tornadoes so that I could tell you how to be more aware, in case one ever comes to your house.
|Greensburg, KS tornado, 2007|
After that, if the wind direction changes, you get something called wind shear, and the hot air in the middle between the top layer of air and the bottom layer will start rotating. And then you have a tornado!
The average speed of a tornado is 30 mph, but some are slower, and others go as fast as 70 mph. The strongest tornadoes have winds that rotate at 250-300 mph. Sometimes a tornado will pick up something light and carry it for several miles. A tornado can also lift something heavy, like a railroad car, but it can't carry it very far. I think a tornado could probably pick up a little dog like me and take me quite a long ways before it dropped me. And if that happened, I would get really dizzy, and it would hurt a lot to be dropped, so that's one reason why I don't want to have any tornadoes come around here.
|EF4 tornado damage. An EF5 tornado|
would probably have taken the pool table, too.
|Moore, OK, 1999 tornado|
Every year, about 1,000 tornadoes hit the U.S., but this number is a pretty rough estimate because the way of reporting and recording tornadoes over the years has changed. The chance that a tornado will hit the square mile of land where you live is about once in a thousand years. Of course, in some parts of the country, your chances of being in a tornado might be bigger, and in other places it's smaller. Also if you are a storm chaser or your name is Dorothy Gale, you are lots more likely to have a close encounter with a twister.
Anyway, we were supposed to have tornado drills here today, so that everybody would know how to hide from a tornado if one comes around. But we are going to have rain and thunderstorms, so the tornado drills got put off until Thursday so that people won't be confused about whether it's a drill or the real thing!