Toni Patterson, age 9. of Lansing, Mich., or the questions
What exactly is a tornado?
A savage little tornado is a vest pocket copy of the huge, howling hurricane, Both of them are storms shaped like doughnuts with angry winds spiraling in towards a hole in the center. The center is a pocket of light rising air. The swirling winds swoop in and when they get to the center of the storm, they zoom upward.
The big hurricane takes perhaps two days to pass overhead: It tosses up great waves and swamps the beaches. It flattens houses and uproots trees. The little tornado is gone in a few minutes. But it leaves a path of total destruction. What it lacks in size, it makes up in fury. The tornado, alias the twister, is rated as the fiercest storm that ever blows.
Twisters are likely to strike from early spring to late fall. They occur most often in our central and southwestern states. Oklahoma gets most of them and the Texas panhandle gets more than its share. In these areas., weather planes era always alert to give warning. The weathermen also are studying what causes the wild little storms. They hope someday to find this out and perhaps to stop them from striking.
Tornadoes occur along with thunderstorms and, in Oklahoma, thunderstorms build up about every three days throughout the summer, They tend to form along a weather front, which is a vast mass of stormy sir as big as a state and several miles high. Many summer thunderstorms form in these turbulent areas and some of them become tornadoes,
In the panhandle prairie country, the sky then becomes a ragged curtain of torn grey clouds, Here and there are patches of yellow glow. The angry little twister may begin as a dark cloud off in the distance. It dips a grey wavering tail down towards the ground. If the tail passes overhead without touching the earthy you feel fierce winds lashing rain and maybe pelting hail.
The real trouble begins when the tail of the twister touches the ground. For it Is almost a vacuum and it words like the vacuum cleaner which sucks up dirt from the dug only on a much bigger scale, The spiraling winds make the center of the tornado into a funnel. The center of the funnel can draw up leaves, dart and atones and lift objects as heavy as roofs, walls, care and even locomotives.
The near vacuum in the heart of the twister pulls everything towards it, When it passes over a house, the air inside bursts out to rush into this vacuum. The walls fall in and the roof collapses. Luckily the tornado is a small sized stormy Its path of destruction is usually only one eighth of a mile wide and perhaps a quarter mile long. In tornado areas, the people learn to spot the wavering funnels in the sky and run to take shelter in their underground storm cellars.