Deborah Condors, age 10, of Phoenix, Ariz., for her question:

Why is a tornado funnel dark?

This Spring your Andy was in the Panhandles of Oklahoma and Texas when the tornadoes struck. And yes, the tornado funnels are dark. The tornado sky was blotched with ragged clouds, some very dark, with lighter onus above. Here and there the blustering winds tore holes in the clouds, showing patches of blue sky. The glare of the sunshine on soma clouds made them an eerie yellow.

The gusty winds of this tornado weather blew round and round and sometimes up and down. The dust whirled and some of it was whisked clear up to the clouds. In all the burly burly the clouds slid not know what to do. They were torn and tossed from warm to cold regions. Their tiny drops of moisture became raindrops and pellets of hail.

Altogether, those clouds ware loaded with rain, hail and dust. This made them heavy and dark, for their particles wore larne and dense enough to blot out the sun. The droplets of a misty white cloud are so small that the sunshine dances through or around them. The big drops in a rain cloud cast shadows within the cloud and shut out tho sunlight.

In Andy's tornado sky there were a number of heavy rain clouds, each wanting to become a tornado. And some of them did. In these the wind whirled around to form a funnel. From time to time a dark tail would divide down from a cloud, dip low and then go back. This cloudy tail was dark with the rain, hail and dust.

Suddenly a big, dark cloud was directly overhead ‑ too close to see whether it had a funnel. The rain poured down and then Andy was pelted with hail stones big as buttons. The afternoon was black as midnight. In a few minutes the hail was several inches deep on the ground. Then the cloud went on its way and the sun came out.

Andy was in the fringe of a tornado, not the center where tine whirling funnel strikes the ground. The funnel of only one in many tornadoes hits the ground. Then the swirling winds work like a vacuum cleaner for the canter of center of the funnel is a column of rising air. It rips out leaves and more sizeable objects and lifts them upward. These objects add to the darkness of the corkscrew tornado. The funnel, already dark when it touches the ground, becomes even darker. For more dust and all sorts of other small objects are added to the spiraling column.

We read of hurricanes and blizzards and. the damage they do. But these monster storms cannot compare with the furious little twister ‑ the fiercest storm on earth. The winds of hurrican force blow 75 miles an hour and some blew even faster. But any average tornado can whip up winds up from two to three hundred miles an hour. Ale do not even knew their top speed, for no wind instrument has ever survived the furious canter of a tornado.