July 30, 2024 • 53 mins
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Tornadoes are not unique to the United States. But they do occur within the United States with greater frequency and strength than anywhere else on the planet due to a unique combination of geographic features. In today's episode, we discuss why the U.S. gets so many tornadoes, where they also occur elsewhere in the world, and why Alabama is actually one of the deadliest areas in the world for tornadoes.
📝 Support us on Substack: https://geographyiseverything.substack.com/
📽️ YouTube: @GeographyByGeoff
📷 Socials: https://linktr.ee/geographybygeoff
📖 Check out Hunter's atlas' here: https://www.indiebound.org/search/book?keys=hunter+shobe
Tornadoes are not unique to the United States. But they do occur within the United States with greater frequency and strength than anywhere else on the planet due to a unique combination of geographic features. In today's episode, we discuss why the U.S. gets so many tornadoes, where they also occur elsewhere in the world, and why Alabama is actually one of the deadliest areas in the world for tornadoes.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hunter. Which state in the United States? Of course? Which
state do you think gets the most amount of tornadoes
on average every single year?
Speaker 2 (00:15):
The state in the United States it gets the most
tornadoes every year on average. I part of me wants
to say Kansas, just to shout out the Wizard of Oz,
but because.
Speaker 3 (00:30):
That's my it's not a bad guess, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
My popular culture imagination. But I'm gonna guess Mississippi.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
Interesting. I well, it's neither Kansas nor Mississippi.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
So I've just got forty eight guesses left, right guesses.
Speaker 1 (00:47):
Well, you're you're not too far away from the state
that does actually get the most amount of tornadoes on average.
Of course there are yearly differences, and that's, you know,
something that we always have to account for. But the
most the state that gets the most man of tornadoes
is Texas.
Speaker 3 (01:01):
So a lot of tornadoes too, I should tip me
off a little bit.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
Yeah, it's a big state, and it's geographically it's in
something called Tornado Alley. Of course, we're going to talk
a little bit more about that and sort of the
nebulousness of sort of the borders of that region a
little bit later, but it is firmly within what we
call tornado Alley, which means it has the right kind
of geographic elements to create this very unique, very dangerous
(01:26):
and deadly phenomenon of the tornado.
Speaker 3 (01:29):
And so.
Speaker 1 (01:32):
The Kansas would also be part of Tornado Alley, along
with Oklahoma and a few other states. Mississippi and Alabama
are not quite a part of the traditional tornado alley, though.
We are going to talk about them because something very
unique is starting to happen to them and there's some
very you know, unfortunate realities that have come into play
(01:55):
with some of their tornado issues that don't quite hit
the other states in this way, and we're going to
talk all about that. Should be really fun, e said.
Speaker 3 (02:03):
Listener.
Speaker 1 (02:03):
If you're in already web which again you click on
this so you should be today we're going to talk
about tornadoes primarily because, for one, we are in the
middle of tornado season right spring summer. This is the
time when most tornadoes are happening. A lot of tornadoes
have already hit sort of the general region of Tornado
Alley and the United States, but also some big ones
(02:26):
have been very well known to have hit other regions
of the world. A big one that I'm thinking of
is one that hit the Guangzhou metropolitan region in southern China,
and that actually caused quite a bit of damage. We'll
talk a little bit about that tornado because there's some
interesting parts about China and their tornado issues that again
(02:46):
not quite the same as the United States, and those
happened to go with some development patterns. Again, we're going
to talk about that. The other reason why I wanted
to talk about kind of that I want to talk
about tornadoes is that there is a brand new twister
movie called Twisters just plural They just pluralized it, that
just came out. It came out the nineteenth July nineteenth,
(03:08):
as you're listening to this, this would be on the thirtieth,
so it's now about a week and a half old.
But you can go back and watch that movie and
get it more of a feel for this phenomenon that
we're talking about, which is interesting because while it's definitely
well known, and I think most people have an idea
of twisters in their head or tornadoes in their head
(03:29):
of what they look like, at least in this country,
I would say most people haven't really experienced them because
they don't happen in where most of the population of
the country lives. It's a very specific area, and we're
going to talk about that. So I think it's one
of those things where it's like it captures that imagination
(03:50):
of people, right, this phenomenon, this otherworldly phenomenon that comes
down and like connects the sky to the land and
creates this funnel of wind and storm and rain and
all that fun stuff. So we're going to talk about
that new or or we're talking about tornados because of
that that that movie that's just come out. I did
(04:12):
want to point out one thing because we're gonna talk
about this all the way. At the end of the
day's episode, the new movie apparently I haven't seen it yet,
apparently completely leaves out any mention of climate change, even
though it's about sort of storm patterns that are growing,
you know, incredibly strong and power. And we're going to
talk about tornadoes and climate change today. So we're we
(04:36):
are going to broach the subject and it's gonna be
I think a little bit interesting from what people are
going to be are going to expect, because well, you know,
I'm just gonna leave it at that. We're just gonna
it's a little hint. Stay until the end. We're gonna
talk about it.
Speaker 3 (04:48):
It's not. Yeah, it's not.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
It's not what you would think at all, and at
least it wasn't when I started my research. All that's
to say is, let's talk about some twisters, Hunter. So
first question, Hunter, I would love it if you could
just try and describe a tornado for listeners in case
they are unaware.
Speaker 2 (05:08):
Right, Well, I have to say first that I've never
I can't say that I've really experienced a tornado before,
although you know, I've seen lots of images, right, I've
seen I've seen the original movie Twister, seen the Wizard
of Oz. But I've also seen you know, these programs
on television where the storm chasers and they're chasing these things, right,
(05:29):
and then footage from dramatic footage from the news, and
it seems to be this sort of funnel of wind
that you know, whips around, this sort of skinny funnel
that sort of twists around, which is I guess why
they call it a twister, and kind of destroys most
of the things in its bath and knocks things over,
picks things up, and you know, projects them into the air.
(05:53):
Hundreds of feet.
Speaker 3 (05:54):
So that's that's what I'm getting from tornado.
Speaker 1 (05:58):
You know, I think you captued certainly, I think you
captured the popular imagination of a tornado, right, this idea
of of this spinning you know, whirlwind of well, this whirlwind,
this whirling of wind that you know, connects the sky
to the ground and then basically creates this path of destruction.
And that is true for some tornadoes. There's obviously who
(06:21):
a lot of and we're gonna get to some of
this a little bit, but there's a lot of tornadoes
out there that we won't cause really any damage at
all to anything sort of you know. I mean obviously
the you know, might lift up some bushes or something,
but it's it's gonna be relatively very mild amount of
damage and certainly nothing material to like buildings.
Speaker 3 (06:37):
Right.
Speaker 1 (06:37):
Most tornadoes, in fact, are pretty benign overall, or at
least a large chunk of them. And we're gonna talk
a little bit about that. But let's first let's go
high level. Let's talk about how a tornado even happens.
So we're gonna do a little bit of sciencey stuff. Again,
I'm not an expert. I'm pulling this information from another source,
And so I guess all that's to say is I'm
not I'm actually not a climatologist here. Who who? Who
(06:59):
can get too deep into this stuff? So bear with
me a little bit. So high level, a tornado is
a violently rotating column of air that is in contact
with both the surface of the Earth and a cumula
nimbus cloud, or, in rare cases, a cumulus cloud. Are
you familiar with either of these cloud types here?
Speaker 3 (07:17):
I know of them, probably should know this.
Speaker 2 (07:19):
I took some climatology classes, but obviously it was not
as attentive as maybe I could have been.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
Yeah, well, I'm not that surprised because I imagine most
people don't really know what a different cloud type is
because it's it is a very small section of a
specific science. A cumulonimbus cloud those are those if you've
seen a lot of clouds, those are those like really
(07:44):
big fat clouds. They sort of go very far wide
and very tall. Right, They're like just very big and
sort of they almost have like an oppressiveness about them.
You know, a lot of times they're like very gray
and dark and stormy. So those are cumulinimous it's because
there's was that foreboding. Yeah, yeah, and so they're just
they're they're up there, and these are the ones that
(08:05):
where a lot of water and weather has sort of condensed,
and that's why they look so well foreboating and you know,
thick for lack of a better word. And so the
tornado will largely funnel funnel out of these clouds for
that specific reason. Of course, as we've already mentioned, tornadoes
can often be referred to as a twister, whirlwind, or cyclone,
(08:27):
although the word cyclone is used in meteorology to name
a weather system rather than a single tornado, so keep
that in mind. Tornadoes also come in various shapes and sizes,
and they are often but not always visible, in the
form of condensation tunnel originating from the base of a
cumulanimous cloud. So all that's to say, there are tornadoes
that are basically invisible to the naked eye. And so
(08:51):
sometimes that happens where sometimes you'll see a video, right,
somebody is recording something. All of a sudden, the sign
or something gets picked up and sort of spins around
and gets thrown, you know, twenty meters away or twenty
feet away. That that's something that just happens, and that
was that was a tornado. It just wasn't visible to
sort of, you know, the naked eye. Most tornadoes in
(09:14):
at least inside the United States have wind speeds less
than one hundred and ten miles per hour, are about
two hundred and fifty feet across, and travel a few
miles before dissipating. These would be classified as minor tornadoes generally.
That still seems like fast.
Speaker 3 (09:30):
Yeah, it's still pretty fast, it's pretty windy.
Speaker 1 (09:34):
Yeah, it's still pretty windy, but it's not it's like
and it can cause some like minor damage. But when
you start to think about it's one hundred and ten
miles per hour, that is less than the mile per
hour of some of the lighter hurricanes, which again they'll
cause some damage, but they're not blowing you know, houses over,
not necessarily uprooting trees. It can happen, but it's just
(09:56):
it's pretty minor. And if you think about the width, right,
so it's two hundre and fifty feet across, again, that
seems really big. You know if you're looking at it,
you know you're standing at the basement. Of course, that's
going to look pretty big. But it's also pretty narrow, right,
so it's the chance that that tornado is going to
cause any damage, is going to hit on the right
spot and actually hit something is pretty slim.
Speaker 3 (10:16):
Now.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
That said, on the extreme end of the high end,
tornadoes can attain wind speeds of more than three hundred
miles per hour. Wow, can be more than two miles
in diameter, oh my goodness, and stay on the ground
for more than sixty miles before dissipating, So that that
gets a lot more destructive when you get one of
(10:37):
those bad boys.
Speaker 3 (10:38):
That's a big one.
Speaker 1 (10:39):
Yeah, that's a big one right now.
Speaker 3 (10:42):
That's that.
Speaker 1 (10:42):
I mean, if that landed in the middle of a city,
it could it would level large, large parts of the city,
which I do believe happened in Joplin back about ten
years ago, Joplin, Missouri, where it basically carved the big
path through that that that town, that city. Various types
of tornadoes would include the multiple vortex tornado, the land spout,
(11:03):
and the water spout. And so these are they kind
of sound it's basically what they sound like. So multiple
vortex tornadoes have two or more vortex columns that originate
from the same cloud. They kind of look they do,
they kind of look pretty cool. They're usually typically weaker
than a normal tornado. I don't know if that's the
case for all of them, but that's sort of what
the data that I saw. And then there's land spouts
(11:26):
and water spouts, which are more narrow tornadoes, so very
very thin and are generally pretty weak, but still form
sort of that column that you can see. The difference
between them, of course, is that one is on land
and the other one is on water. A water spout,
of course, is taking up a lot. So if you
look at a tornado that's on land, a lot of
the debris that's pulling up, it's gonna be a lot
(11:47):
of dirt, and that ends up being one of the
things that's really destructive, especially to humans, right because these
little things can hit you and cause a lot of damage.
A water vortex is obviously not pulling up dirt. It's
gonna be pulling up water, and so has that sort
of effect to it. Some other tornado like phenomena that
exists in nature would include the gust nato, the dust devil,
(12:10):
the firewhorl, which sounds particularly scary. I don't ever want
to see a fireworld, right, and then the steam devil,
which I have also never seen a steam devil, I
can't say that. So my grandparents used to live in
the deserts of Nevada, and as such I did see
a lot of dust devils out there. Have you ever
(12:30):
seen a dust devil?
Speaker 3 (12:31):
I believe I have. Yeah, yeah, it's not I.
Speaker 1 (12:34):
Would say most people.
Speaker 2 (12:35):
Who it's interesting, but it's not quite as intimidating as
the three hundred mile per hour storm you've described before.
Speaker 1 (12:42):
Right, Well, And it's like the primary difference and the
reason why these are tornado like they're not they're not
actually tornadoes, but they're tornado like in that they create
like a little funnel system. You can sort of see
them blowing around. They're usually pretty small, right, So the
dust devils I've seen have never been really larger than
a human being, right, like a foot six foot tall
human being. The reason why they're not technically tornadoes is
(13:04):
because they're not forming out of a clouds. They're not
technically connecting the sky to the earth right in the
same way that a tornado is. Instead, it's just creating
a little phenomenon, usually some very highly localized you know,
shifting of sort of what pressure systems combined with wind
and it just sort of gets caught up in itself
and it'll blow something around for a little bit, usually dust,
(13:27):
that's all. It is a fire what was called a firewhirl?
Speaker 3 (13:32):
Right? Where do my notes go?
Speaker 1 (13:35):
So? Yeah, fireworld, the fireworld I have. So I actually
didn't look this up because it was sort of just
this is just a footnote, but I'm going to look
it up right now because now I'm curious possibly be
so here it is. It's a firewhirl or fire devil
is a whirlwind induced by a fire and often at
least partially composed of flame or ash. These start with
(13:56):
a whirlwind, often made visible by smoke, and may occur
when intense rising heat and turbulent wind conditions combined to
form whirling eddies of air, and these eddies can contract
a tornado like vortex. It sucks in debris and combustible gases.
And so there's a picture here which it does look
very scary, and it seems like these are mostly due
(14:18):
to wildfires that are occurring that have sort of mimicked
similar scenarios where there's pressure systems and winds blowing through
and then it just captures some of that fire and
will blow it around into a very scary phenomenon that
I definitely never want to see.
Speaker 3 (14:35):
I don't want to win, but yeah, I'd be okay
with with missing that. I think.
Speaker 1 (14:42):
Now, obviously, as humans hunter, we like to measure things, right,
That's true to argue that we like to try and
measure everything as we possibly can, and so we have
created a whole system of measurement just for tornadoes. Have
you ever heard of of actually we have two, we
have two measure Have you ever heard of the Fujita scale?
Speaker 2 (15:03):
If by any chance you know, this is going to
shock you to learn that I'm not familiar with the
Fujia scale.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
You know, it's funny because if if you watch that
the old movie Twister, yeah, not the new one Twisters,
they do mention the Fujita scale in it, or at
least they mentioned like the the the different scales of right,
they're they're they're track, they're tracking these tornadoes. You know
one's an f's you know zero ones an F one
as an F two something like that. Right, They're like, oh,
(15:29):
we got to go find this F four, you know, tornado.
We Gotta storm Chase it, and so I.
Speaker 2 (15:35):
Watched that one again to pick to glean these kinds
of facts up and to prepare for the new movie
as well.
Speaker 1 (15:40):
Of course, yeah, I would be curious, and we're gonna
talk about this. I'd be curious to know if the
new movie mentions the scale, and if they do, if
they mentioned the old scale or the new scale, because
I think, well, we're gonna let's talk about it. So
we have these two scales, Fujita Scale and the Enhanced
Fujita Scale, and they're more commonly referred to on its
sort of their numeric scale, preceded by either F or
(16:02):
EF so F zero, F one, F two or EF
you know, blah blah blah blah blah. The Enhanced Fujita
Scale was created to reflect better examinations of tornado damage
surveys in order to align wind speeds more closely with
what the expected and associated damage would be. So we're
going to we'll see sort of how that that sort
of plays out when we get into sort of some
(16:23):
of the different scaling here. But I did want to
call out that there is a geography that's attached to
these scaling systems as well. Because not every country uses
the same scale anymore, if you can believe it. So,
the United States and Canada have adopted and now used
the enhanced Fujita scale since two thousand and seven and
twenty thirteen, respectively. The rest of the world still uses
(16:47):
the older Fujita scale. Apparently, However, in my research, the
enhanced Fujita scale is being being more widely used, perhaps
more locally rather than sort of nationally adopted, but it's
it is being used in other places outside of the
US and Canada as well, I guess I just want
to point that out officially, though it's only Canada in
the US they use this new scale. To me, though,
(17:10):
this probably makes sense, and we're going to talk about
why later in today's episode, but it makes sense that,
in my opinion, that Canada and the US specifically would
move to something that's perhaps a little bit more accurate
and perhaps more damage focused.
Speaker 3 (17:24):
Okay, yeah, a little more nuanced, perhaps.
Speaker 1 (17:27):
A little more nuance. Yeah, So we'll talk a little
bit about that, but let's go through each scale because
they're a little bit different. So Fujia scale tornadoes are
broken down on a scale of F zero to F six.
So this would be used to determine the damage broadly
of any given tornado. It's just not aligned quite correctly
because it's a little bit older. And so a tornado
(17:48):
at the scale of F zero would have a wind
speed of less than seventy two miles per hour and
would be expected to cause light damage. Light damage being
this has ripped up a bush, right, there's no more
on this tree, that kind of thing.
Speaker 3 (18:02):
Very light.
Speaker 1 (18:03):
This, of course then ramps up right, so an F
one would have wind speeds between seventy three and one
hundred and twelve miles per hour create more damage. F
two one hundred and thirteen to one hundred and fifty
seven miles per hour caused significant damage at that point,
and F three would be one hundred and fifty eight
to two hundred and six miles per hour cause even
more damage. And then we get two sort of the
(18:23):
higher end scales, which would be F four, where now
you have tornadoes that have wind speeds of between two hundred,
two hundred and seven and two hundred and sixty miles
per hour. And this is where the damage now turns
into a more catastrophic level. Right, this is no longer
just a home here or there, which obviously is catastrophic
for those individuals, but not necessarily for our whole community
(18:45):
or city. F four is where you start to hit
those levels, and then you get to the f F five,
which has mile per hour speeds of between two hundred
and sixty one and three hundred and eighteen miles per hour,
and these are the ones where well, again, if we
go back to our Twister movie from the mid nineteen nineties,
that's the biggie, right, that's the one that ends up
causing all the damage in is like the big it's
(19:06):
the big bad of the episode.
Speaker 3 (19:07):
It's like the bad.
Speaker 2 (19:08):
Category five is maybe the way they referred to it
or something like that.
Speaker 1 (19:12):
Right, yeah, yeah, yeah, And so there is So there's
there's an F six earthquake or not earthquake tornado. There's
an F six tornado that would have windspeed greater than
three hundred and eighteen miles per hour, and this would
cause role really, it would cause inconceivable damage. And the
reason why it will cause inconceivable damage is because there
have been no recorded F six tornadoes to have landed
(19:36):
anywhere on the planet within the modern history, the recorded history, So.
Speaker 2 (19:39):
It could have happened, and it could still happen, but
since we've been using the scale, there haven't been any.
Speaker 1 (19:48):
There haven't been any, yep. But there have been a
lot of F five tornadoes. So the US has had,
or the world has had sixty seven F five tornadoes
recorded in total, of which fifty nine of those have
hit within the United States.
Speaker 3 (20:02):
Well that's most of them. Yeah, wow, that's most of them.
Speaker 1 (20:06):
Yes, So now you can kind of understand why the
US might be leaning towards a scale that's perhaps a
little bit more nuanced towards what kind of damage can expect.
So that's where the Enhanced Fujia scale comes in, and
it's broken out between well, still six scales, but this
time it's between E FU and then through e F
five so EF zero one, two, three, four five. It's
(20:27):
the same basic sort of system, except the mile per
hours are a little bit different. So in e FU,
this is basically means they don't they don't know how
fast the wind speeds were going because it was just
not really it wasn't big enough to really be trapped,
so it's no surveyable damage whatsoever. And then it goes
up from there, so EF zero sixty five to eighty five,
e F one eighty six to one hundred and ten,
(20:49):
e F two one hundred and eleven to one hundred
and thirty five, e F three one hundred thirty six
to one hundred and sixty five, e F four one
hundred and sixty six to two hundred and then the
e F five, the biggest bad of them all, would
be anything above two hundred miles per hour. This would
be a little different from the Fujia scale because there
are top end here is now tornadoes that are that
(21:13):
are that happened you know, quite often, right, not super common,
but there's no longer a scale where it's like, we
don't have any any sort of track records, so I
don't have account of how many EF fives there have been,
but I can tell you based on the science that
approximately one half of a one half of zero point
one percent, so a very small fraction of global tornadoes
(21:35):
are e F fives. The most common would be the
EF zero, followed by the EF one you know, make
up about eighty three to eighty five percent of all tornadoes. Okay, wow,
I've said a lot about tornadoes already. If you can
believe it, we already have to hit our very first
ad break here, and I really hope listener that it
is an ad for Twisters for you right now, because
(21:58):
I just like to think that our ads were in
conjection with our episode topics. I don't know, So anyways,
go listen to these ads and maybe one will be
for the movie, and you'll go watch the movie and
we'll be right back, and we're back. This is the
(22:21):
Geography Is Everything Podcast. We're talking all about tornadoes today.
We've been lost talking about the movie Twister. We talk
about the movie Twisters. We're gonna keep talking a little
bit about both those movies as we go through this.
But I wanted to take a moment at the beginning
of this part of our episode to talk about more
specifically about where tornadoes strike. So, Hunter, where would you
expect tornadoes to hit around the world.
Speaker 2 (22:46):
Well, I'm based on what we learned in the first
part of the episode, the United States pretty popular spot
for tornadoes to hit. And I'm thinking sort of the
the midwestern spine of the United States is where a
lot of them are.
Speaker 1 (23:00):
That that is where the popular sort of idea of
where tornadoes hit. That's that that that is and that's true,
right like that, that's a lot of tornadoes hit that region.
And I would say that maybe it's a US bias
that that we have here in this country. Maybe there is,
you know, just because it does happen very frequently within
the United States, particularly within that area. There is a
(23:23):
popular misconception that tornadoes generally only strike the US, aside
from rare, sort of freak sort of incidents outside of
the United States. That said, tornadoes are actually not as
unique as that as as maybe that misconception leads people
to believe or that that idea. So every single continent
(23:44):
aside from Antarctica, has had a tornado hit somewhere within
it to some degree of strength within the last year.
So there's no place that has not had a tornado.
And these are actual tornadoes, not dust devils, not you
know whatever. These are actual you know, full spouts, you know,
connecting sky to the land. But that's not to say
that all tornadoes are created equally, and I think that's
(24:05):
sort of again that leads people to believe that a
lot of tornadoes are hit you know, tornadoes only hit
the United States. Because there are roughly seven places where
tornadoes happen most frequently so the United States and Canada.
Tornadoes hit basically basically everywhere inside the United States and Canada,
right every We'll talk a little about this, but every
state has had a tornado.
Speaker 3 (24:26):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (24:28):
Northern Mexico also gets a fair amount of tornadoes, mostly
within the sort of same area that would be connecting
into the you know what we would call the tornado alley.
We will talk more about tornado alley in a little bit.
So let's move on from the United States, Canada, in Australia,
particularly along the eastern coast, but sometimes on the West
coast as well. Okay, in East Asia, primarily in the Philippines, Japan,
(24:53):
and China. China is very interesting because they don't tend
to get a lot of tornadoes, but so when they do,
they tend to be very destructive and they tend to
hit urbanized areas far more often. So, for example, I
mentioned earlier, you know a tornado that hit the Guangzhou
metro area nineteen million people, and it basically flattened an
entire industrial area of the city. And so it's when
(25:16):
this happens to China, it typically tends to be far
more destructive than say, tornado alley, but that's a large
in large part just due to the fact that there's
a lot more people living in China and it's hitting
in an area that happens to be a lot more
developed than tornado alley.
Speaker 2 (25:31):
Right, So China's tornado alley has more people in it,
that's what's happening.
Speaker 1 (25:35):
Probably, Yeah, but they don't really have a tornado alley.
They like, they get some tornadoes, it's just not it's
not frequent enough in a single area, it's not as concentrated,
and most places don't really have a tornado alley. There's
a reason why tornado alley exists very specifically. There's there's
a combination of geographic elements that occur that don't really
(25:56):
occur in the same place to the same degree. Again,
we're gonna talk about.
Speaker 3 (26:01):
That in a minute.
Speaker 1 (26:02):
Continuing on, tornadoes will hit in eastern India and Bangladesh.
They will hit in Southern Africa within the country of
South Africa, but also Les Sootho and Eswatini broadly. Europe
gets a lot of tornadoes, including Ireland and the United Kingdom.
Typically a lot of times they hit inside the water,
so they're not quite as well known though, and then
(26:24):
in South America around Buenos Aires area of Argentina, and
then and then up into Uruguay they will also get
some tornadoes there. So while tornadoes are not uncommon in
many parts of the world, the United States in particular
stands out as being the country that gets the most
tornadoes every year had a power that most other regions
(26:47):
of the world rarely experience. And so this is sort
of what I was talking about earlier. So, like I
already mentioned, every state in the US, including Puerto Rico
and Washington, d C. Has had a tornado touch ground
at some point between nineteen fifty and nineteen or nineteen
fifty and twenty twenty one. I think that was the
most recent data I could find. Maybe there's some twenty
twenty two data out there now. And overall, during that
(27:12):
span of seventy one years, over sixty seven thousand tornadoes
have touch ground somewhere in the United States.
Speaker 3 (27:19):
That's a whole lot, lot of tornadoes.
Speaker 1 (27:20):
Yeah, that's a lot of tornados. So that would translate
to roughly nine hundred and sixty five tornadoes hitting every
single year if we look at only the last twenty years.
So that number does increase to about one thousand, two
hundred and thirty tornadoes every year. That might make you
think that climate change has something to do with it.
In fact, it's actually more likely just because we're able
(27:42):
to record and track tornadoes with a higher degree of efficiency.
So we're going to talk a little about that later. Europe, however, does,
like I had mentioned, does get quite a lot of tornadoes.
So they get about seven hundred tornadoes per year. That's
a bunch, yeah, But again, a lot of the power
of the tornadoes in Europe are typically much smaller, so
they're not as newsworthy for lack of a better term,
(28:04):
And many of Europe's tornadoes actually tend to be these
warrants which we've already covered and are far weaker, and
they take place over water, so they're not really causing
any damage aside from you know, if you have a
fishing vessel inside of its.
Speaker 3 (28:15):
Path, then that'll that's bad, that'll.
Speaker 1 (28:17):
Cause a mass yep. Yeah. And so this leads us
to tornado alley hunter, what do you where? Would you say?
Tornado alley is like, can you give us? Can you
map us out? Map us a geographic boundary of this place?
Speaker 3 (28:32):
All right.
Speaker 2 (28:33):
My My guess is Tornado Alley could is probably a
loosely defined kind of area, so it could include different places.
But I'm thinking that a lot of Texas, Central Texas
into Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakota's reaching over into Iowa, Illinois, Missouri, Arkansas,
(28:55):
maybe as far down as Louisiana and Mississippi.
Speaker 3 (28:59):
Maybe I'm drawing it too widely, but something like that,
and then maybe reaching as far north into Canada as well.
Speaker 1 (29:06):
You know, it is funny because you hit on something
that I think I almost immediately wanted to cover, and
is that this is a this is a loosely defined,
you know, region rights depending on who you are, right,
It's it's not there's no there's no one meteorologist or
you know, the National Oceanic Administration Atmosphere and Administration like
(29:26):
they haven't drawn like this is this is Tornado Alley
and everything. I felt like that's that doesn't exist. It
is broadly just a swath of area within more commonly
associated with the states of Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa,
and South Dakota that we encompassed this area. So you
(29:47):
you you got all of those states, you did include
I think it was Missouri and Arkansas and maybe even Louisiana.
These are all states that get tornadoes too, right, Missouri,
Missouri not is not technically well, it's not commonly associated
with tornado alley. I would argue that it is still
very much a part of it because they still get
(30:08):
a lot of tornadoes, and they can tend to be
very destructive in Missouri, just as they can in Kansas.
Speaker 3 (30:14):
Right.
Speaker 2 (30:14):
Yeah, you know, I remember reading a short piece by
David Foster Wallace who talks about playing tennis and tornado alley.
But he's located in I think Illinois at that point,
so for him, that's that's tornado Alley. But again, that's
vernacular region.
Speaker 3 (30:31):
People can imagine it the way they.
Speaker 1 (30:32):
Want exactly, So regardless of sort of how you cut
in slice tornado alley. If we just take those those
six states that I had mentioned as being sort of
the most commonly referred to as I would again be Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa,
and South Dakota. If we just take those six states,
those states have received thirty seven percent of all recorded
(30:55):
tornadoes in the United States. So that's that's a big
chunk yep of them. Right, of sixty seven thousand tornadoes,
that's a lot of tornadoes. And this is due to
a very specific set of geographic circumstances that this region
in particular gets hit with most. And so let's talk
(31:19):
about this because again this is very unique to the
United States. So tornadoes they form out of large thunderstorms.
I don't think that's a big surprise here. So inside
those storms, there's this warm, humid air that's rising while
cool air starts to fall. Right, This is sort of
what creates that funnel system and that sort of starts
(31:39):
the spinning. Right, these sort of mix of mix of
pressure systems that are going on, and it's this region
that happens to get the ingredients to create that exact
kind of storm system almost perfectly. So Tornado Alley exists
at the confluence of three sort of geographic weather systems.
So coming in from the north is a front of cold,
(32:02):
dry air from Canada, the jet Stream and the Rocky
Mountains that's sort of pushing its way south into this region. Okay,
from the southwest. At the same time, you have this
sort of gust of warm, dry air pushing in from
the Mojave and Sonoran and sort of the Chihuahuan deserts
of northern Mexico up into this region. Right, it's moving
(32:24):
up into sort of this Texas, Oklahoma Kansas area. And
then finally, the missing ingredient that a lot of places
don't have at the same time is a heavy dose
of warm, moist air that is moving in from the
Gulf of Mexico up into this same exact region. And
(32:47):
so when you get these three elements to combine, you
sort of have the right concoction to create these really
massive thunderstorms which then are able to combine into to
create this funnel system. I think that is so interesting
because tornado alleys simply wouldn't exist if, you know, let's say,
(33:08):
the Rocky Mountains weren't there, or the Mohabbi Desert wasn't there,
or the Gulf of Mexico wasn't there. And the Gulf
of Mexico is particularly interesting because it's a very large
body of water that happens to be very warm, and
it happens to, you know, be able to create these
concoctions in a level that not very many other places
in the world can, and so no other region in
(33:29):
the world really has all three of these required and
ingredients as prominently as the United States. And that's why,
you know, if we go back to our Fujiita scale,
you know, f five tornadoes, I believe there was sixty
seven total inside the world, and I think it was
like fifty nine of them hit inside the United States.
Speaker 3 (33:47):
And that's the reason why. Yeah, yeah, well that adds up. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (33:52):
Yeah. It's just it's so interesting, right, It's like all
these different things, how does this how does this happen?
Like how does how do these things come together? It's like, well, well,
there's there.
Speaker 3 (34:01):
It is.
Speaker 1 (34:01):
It's like it's all like plane is It's almost like
plane is English. If you if you just like know
what these things are doing, you're like, oh yeah, I
get it now, like dry air, cold cold, very cold air,
very hot, dry air, and very wet, moist, humid air.
And it's like you smash all this together, that's gonna
cause some issues for the Star. Yeah, yeah, exactly. But
(34:22):
here's where things kind of get a little more interesting, Hunter,
because while Tornado Alley does get a lot of tornadoes,
and we've covered that already, as it turns out, it
is actually one of the safer areas to be in
with respects to regions that have a high amount of
tornado activity. So Texas, for example, has approximately one third
(34:44):
the average annual amount of deaths caused by tornadoes than Alabama,
despite Texas having many more tornadoes per year. Why do
you think this might be?
Speaker 3 (34:57):
I guess.
Speaker 2 (34:58):
My guess is that there are more people living in
sort of marginal circumstances closer to places where tornadoes are hitting,
so and then maybe the infrastructure is not as fired up,
and so the damage that is done is more significant
than it would be, for example, in Texas.
Speaker 3 (35:16):
That's my guess.
Speaker 1 (35:18):
That is that's a that's a great guess, and I
am neither going to confirm nor deny it because before
we do that, we have to hit our last ad.
Brak Oh, I got a little bit of an We
all got to wait, all right, we all got to wait.
So come back after the ad break, listen to these ads.
Hopefully it's another Twisters ad, and come back and we'll
talk a little bit about whether Hunter was right or wrong.
(35:38):
So I guess, I guess we'll be all right back
and we're back. This is the Geography Is Everything Podcast.
We just ran through a bunch of tornado information. We
just ran through all about tornado Alley, and I left
you with a little bit of a cliffhanger where I
(35:59):
asked Hunter, what the why Alabama might have might be
more dangerous with respects to tornadoes than Texas, and you
would mention what was what did you mention again about that?
Speaker 2 (36:09):
My response dealt with that there are probably more people
perhaps in uh more people in the line of tornadoes
to begin with, but also living in conditions that are
less secure. Perhaps maybe has something to do with the
proximity to two bodies of water or something like that.
(36:31):
But yeah, I'm thinking it's mostly like sociological kind of
stuff going on here.
Speaker 1 (36:36):
Well, you're you're you are partially right, We're gonna there's
there's actually multiple reasons, as there always usually is so,
and luckily there's a geographic answer for us, because we're
a geography podcasts are always fun. So let's go let's
go back a little bit before I fully answer the question.
Let's talk a little about Alabama and Mississippi more broadly,
so that we can sort of get an idea of
(36:56):
you know, how are they getting tornadoes because they're not
they are a little departed from Arnado Alley, but they
are getting tornadoes. So overall these two states they account
for about seven percent of all tornadoes in the country.
Not a huge amount necessarily, but I would argue still
a significant amount, yes, And they experience these storms for
largely the same reason as Tornado Alley. Right, the cold
(37:18):
air from Canada, the warm air from the Mojave desert
Snorin Desert, and then the moist air from the Gulf
of Mexico. Same ingredients sort of being pulled together, but
they occur less frequently because the cold northern air from
Canada doesn't often reach as far south as it does Kansas, Nebraska,
or even Texas.
Speaker 3 (37:37):
It's missing often missing one of those ingredients.
Speaker 1 (37:41):
It's often missing one of those key ingredients, and it
typically tends to be that cold air. But when a
tornado does hit these two states, things can get a
little dicey. So you see, there are three primary reasons
why Alabama specifically Alabama, but this would also include Miami,
but or not Miami, Mississippi. Alabama specifically has a much
(38:01):
higher fatality rate when it comes to tornadoes than say Texas.
And the first is that, as it turns out, most
tornadoes that hit the Southeast tend to be nocturnal tornadoes.
So this is because tornadoes tend to strike in the
Southeast in the early spring when there are fewer hours
in the day. And so a tornado that hits at night, well,
(38:22):
people tend to be sleeping, right, they tend to be
less active, less aware or even you know, just they're
just not seeing any as much, right, They're not noticing
that there's even a storm.
Speaker 3 (38:33):
Perhaps they're inside.
Speaker 1 (38:35):
Perhaps, yeah, they're inside. And so this creates issues when
you need to get people into shelter quickly. So there's
that aspect. The second reason though, is simply and you
this is sort of what you were alluding to, is
simply that the Southeast is far more built up and
developed than the Great Plains States. Right, So if you
(38:55):
look at a map, let's listener, go google the and
if you're watching on youtube'll be here in front of you.
But go google like a nighttime aerial map of the
United States, and you can see all of the lights
that are, you know, go throughout the unit that pop
up throughout the country where there's some sort of population center,
and you can you can see that line that sort
(39:16):
of hits where all of a sudden, there's no there's
no more development. It's almost like a very broad stroke
and sort of this area, this big swath from north
to south where it's like where did all the people go?
Of course there are people living there, but it's just
far fewer.
Speaker 3 (39:28):
Right.
Speaker 1 (39:30):
Alabama and Mississippi are firmly within the region where there's
a lot of development. So you can start to see, Okay,
a tornado pops down in Alabama, far likely, far far
higher chance that is going to hit where people are
actually living, versus the Great Plains, where there's actually a
pretty sizable chance that's going to hit nowhere, just like
in the middle of a field somewhere middle of grassy
(39:52):
plains mm hm, not.
Speaker 2 (39:55):
Doing as much damage and not as not as big
a cost to human well be being a human life.
Speaker 1 (40:01):
Absolutely and finally, and this is kind of similar to
the last reason, but the natural geography of the Southeast
does create more hazards for when a tornado does inevitably hit,
So Alabama and Mississippi they tend to have more trees,
which will you know, when a tornado hits them, will
be picked up and typically thrown around, and that causes
(40:22):
a lot of damage. I'm sure somebody's seen. Most people
have seen sort of one of those iconic images of
sort of like a tree branch. It's like now in
the middle of like a fence because it's sort of
like was thrown at such a high speed that sort
of busted right through and sort of very I don't know,
uncanny a little bit. It's like, how did that even happen? Yeah,
And there's like still leaves on it somehow, and you're like, wow,
that's weird.
Speaker 3 (40:42):
And wood is heavy, so yeah, I can do some damage.
Speaker 1 (40:46):
Wood is heavy, tends to be tends to be a
lot of damage when it hits things.
Speaker 3 (40:51):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (40:52):
The other thing, though, is that the area of Alabama
tends to have a lot of rolling hills, Okay, and
these are able to hide oncoming tornadoes in ways that
they can't and they don't really in the Great Plants,
which don't have the same kind of rolling topography. And
so for these three reasons, this region, these two states
(41:15):
tend to have a much deadlier history than places that
get more frequent and oftentimes even more powerful tornadoes. And
it's just the natural geography of and and the human
geography of where we've built, right, these are these are
things that have all occurred, that we've all done, and
sort of that creates this system where the tornado is
(41:35):
going to just cause a lot more damage. And so
all of this creates an area where you know, that
has fewer tornadoes with a far deadlier record than Tornado Alley.
And so now let's let's go back to sort of
what I was talking about early on the beginning of
the episode, leave behind Tornado Alley a little bit and
talk more broadly about tornadoes and climate change. So, if
(41:58):
you recall at the beginning of that, so we were
talking about this Twisters movie, and that movie very intently
focuses on an ever increasing amount of power of tornadoes
and damage of these megastorms that are causing I haven't
seen it, but I'm assuming it's very like intense and
suspenseful and all this stuff. But apparently so the movie
(42:21):
neglects to mention climate change even once it's completely left
out of the equation. And this was done because the
director apparently didn't want to be political, didn't want this
to be a political statement. X y Z. I think
we can both agree that that is probably political into itself.
Speaker 3 (42:39):
It's in and of itself a political statement.
Speaker 1 (42:41):
I agree, because I mean, it's climate change. Is it's
a thing, it's happening, it's whatever. Unfortunately, as it turns out,
the director may have actually made the right call, though
I would argue for the wrong reason.
Speaker 3 (42:58):
Okay, to break it down.
Speaker 1 (43:01):
So let's break it down. So climate change, so so okay,
let's go back and back a little bit.
Speaker 3 (43:08):
So.
Speaker 1 (43:09):
According to the to a National Geographic article on the subject,
climate change's impact on the frequency, power, and duration of
tornadoes is complex and not well understood yet even to
this day. This is an article from twenty twenty three.
It didn't have an author, which I thought was weird.
I think it was just sort of one of those
(43:30):
their boilerplate explainer things. I just wanted to call that out.
Not leaving out an author, it just didn't include one.
But according to this article, predicting how climate change affects
tornadoes is difficult due to their relatively small size, short life,
and short short lifespans compared to other extreme weather events
such as hurricanes. So instead, scientists have been focusing on
how climate change alters the conditions necessary for super cell thunderstorms.
(43:56):
Those are the things that caused this stuff, right, those
you know, produces the tornadoes. And so these conditions again,
they include warm, moist air and unstable atmosphere and wind shear.
Climate change increases atmospheric instability, but apparently it's also it's
also been seen to decrease wind shear, so this makes
(44:17):
it hard to predict the net effect on tornado formation.
So they're sort of in a way canceling each other
out right. Climate change is increasing the instability of the
atmosphere up there, but the wind shear is actually going down.
So you need both of these and high quantities to
create the tornado. So this is sort of where scientists
(44:39):
are stumbling over themselves a little bit. It's like, well,
climate change is happening, it's a thing, but are they
having an impact on tornadoes? It's not really, they can't
really figure that out yet. Now, studies do suggest that
climate change might lead to more severe thunderstorms, but again
that doesn't necessarily mean tornadoes, as only a fraction of
(44:59):
super sales actually produced tornadoes. So again, you know, we
might see you know, one aspect of the tornado system
come into play, but it might now ever, create the
necessary conditions for an actual tornado two to hit the ground.
And again, if we go back to sort of what
when we had that full count of tornadoes, you know
I mentioned, No, there's one thousand, two hundred and sixty
(45:20):
five tornadoes on average per year since nineteen ninety. A
lot of people point to that as a reason for oh, well,
clearly there's an increase in tornadoes. But again, just to
call it out, the technology that has gone into tracking
tornadoes has improved dramatically since nineteen ninety, and so we're
able to track them much more frequently. So there could
have been throughout the fifty sixty seventies, there could have
(45:42):
been more tornadoes that we just weren't tracking. Obviously there were,
we didn't have the same technology to track them, and
there were fewer people to even look at them.
Speaker 3 (45:49):
Right.
Speaker 1 (45:49):
There's a lot more people now than there were in
nineteen sixty or nineteen seventy.
Speaker 2 (45:53):
Right, so there's a lot more incidences of recording them.
And I mean this is also an illustration of something
we've talked about a few times before on the program,
which is that the climate change is real and it's
having some very significant effects. However, not everything that has
to do with the weather is necessarily related.
Speaker 3 (46:12):
To climate change, right, Like that.
Speaker 2 (46:15):
If something extreme happens, it may or may not be
related to climate change. It sounds like there's a lot
of research going on, so we you know, we should
acknowledge climate change, but we do ourselves a disservice if
we just assume that everything that everything that's cataclysmically is
happening is necessarily related to.
Speaker 1 (46:31):
It, exactly right. So all this is to say, Hunter,
is that recent research is inconclusive on sort of the
direct impacts of climate change on tornadoes, but it is
showing that tornado patterns are changing. So there are now
apparently fewer days that have at least one tornado, but
(46:55):
more days that have multiple tornadoes, so leading to clustered
events clustered tornado events. There are some geographic shifts indicate
that fewer tornadoes are hitting Tornado Alley, but more in
the southeastern United States such as Alabama and Mississippi. But
these changes might not they might be linked to climate change,
(47:16):
or they might not be right. So it's difficult to distinguish,
you know, individual events as you were mentioning just now,
from climate variations in climate change from events that have
been happening for a lot longer, such as events like
El Nino or La Nina, right, and you know, maybe
then you can trace that that, you know, there's more
(47:38):
Al Nina or more La Nina's related to climate change.
But it's it's starting to get a little too far
departed from these very you know, small, relatively small, isolated
events to be able to draw these big fat lines too.
So one last thing. According to the National Climate Assessment,
while some extreme weather can be directly attributed to global war,
(48:00):
the link between climate change and tornadoes remains uncertain. So
this is from our National Climate sort of governing body.
Climate change does result in warmer, wetter world that will
affect extreme weather events, but they don't know whether they
don't know whether that's actually causing an impact on tornadoes.
(48:22):
And so that's all I really have to say about
tornadoes today. It's been a lot of windy, gusty talk, I.
Speaker 2 (48:30):
Don't know, crazy conversation. Yeah, no, it's I'm realizing now
that I didn't know a lot of this stuff. So
it's good that I was here to listen to you
because I just learned a lot.
Speaker 1 (48:43):
Well, Hunter, tornadoes can't hit Oregon, but it's pretty rare,
so we probably won't have to deal with one and
if one does ever hit, and actually I think one
hit a couple of years ago. I remember seeing a
video on it. I think it was somewhere down like
in Salem area, which is listener if you're not aware
of Oregon geography or cities, it's you know, about forty
(49:04):
five minutes south of Portland. Anyways, it was pretty small.
I think it picked up like I think like I
saw it, like pick up and move a car like
a few feet. Well it's like sort of lifted one
end and like dropped it, not like fully off and
just picked up one side. Still, though, it's that's not nothing, right,
It's still.
Speaker 3 (49:22):
Like messed up your transmission for sure, you know, I.
Speaker 1 (49:25):
Mean absolutely yeah, but overall relatively mild. So while this
has been an easy, breezy discussion of tornadoes, I'm not
super we don't have to necessarily be worried too much
about it. And those of you who are in Tornado
Alley or within the southeast, hopefully you are better prepared
than you know. Certainly we are here with your various
alert systems. So anyways, Hunter, where can people find you
(49:49):
if they want to do that, or just tell people
who you are.
Speaker 3 (49:51):
Thanks, Jeff. I'm Hunter Showby.
Speaker 2 (49:53):
I'm a professor of geography at Portland State University. I'm
co author of Portland's a Cultural Atlas and Upper Left
City is a Cultural Atlast of San Francisco, Portland and Seattle.
And with you, Jeff, I'm host co host of the
Geography Is Everything podcast what you're listening to right now.
Speaker 1 (50:11):
Yeah, my name's Jeff Gibson. I'm also the co host
of this podcast. Really fun talking all about tornadoes today.
It's really fun talking about everything, all the geography we
had to talk about. If you want to find me
elsewhere around the web, you can mover on YouTube. That's
YouTube dot com slash Little Last Sign Geography by Jeff,
and you can listen to or you can watch all
the videos I've created. You can also listen to my
other podcasts now Around the World with Jeff, where I
(50:33):
just talk about different countries and states and provinces and
I have a guest who is from that place, and
so they sort of help walk us through it, and
you sort of get the perspective of somebody who's.
Speaker 3 (50:45):
Nice there, the local knowledge Yeah.
Speaker 1 (50:47):
A local knowledge or at least somebody who has significant
experience with it. I shouldn't say now, everybody's always going
to be in the place that they're talking about, and
that's that's fine. Sure, go check that out around the world.
You can listen on every podcast app you want, or
on YouTube on my my same YouTube channel. If you
like this conversation on tornadoes and you learn something, you
really enjoyed it, you learned, learn learned, you really enjoyed
(51:09):
learning all about sort of tornado alley and the unique
geographic aspects of that place in the planet, then please
like and subscribe over on YouTube if you're watching there,
or rate and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Good Pods, podcecasts,
any of these, you know, wonderful apps that are out there,
really helps us out. It's really fun seeing those, and
you know, I read each one, and you know, people
(51:30):
are usually highly complimentary. If you want this to deliver
directly into your email, you can. That's just over on
geography as Everything dot substack dot com. So go and
sign up over there, totally free. Check it out next
week hunter, I'm trying to get a little parched here.
Speaker 3 (51:45):
Yeah, it's like talking next week.
Speaker 1 (51:48):
We're going to tackle one of the largest corporations in
the world. This is this is actually gonna be your
app so you're gonna be.
Speaker 3 (51:54):
Leading this one.
Speaker 1 (51:56):
It's all about Nestle.
Speaker 2 (51:57):
It's all about Nestle, and it is the largest food
company in the world, I believe, and has been around
for a while and has made some pretty big impacts
in different parts of the world. So truly transnational. And
so there's there's a lot of geographies of Nesli to
talk about.
Speaker 1 (52:15):
Yeah, and some I mean just just based on what
I know. I'm not even I've not done any of
the research for this episode, but just based on what
I know, it has a very dark and destructive history,
particularly with some some very specific regions of the.
Speaker 3 (52:28):
World that I know.
Speaker 2 (52:29):
There's some controversial aspects to what they've been selling and
where they've been selling it.
Speaker 3 (52:36):
So we'll we'll talk about that stuff for sure.
Speaker 1 (52:39):
Well, come back next week, we'll talk all about NESLEI
and I guess until then, I don't know. I hope
I stay away from tornadoes. Don't go if you see
a tornado, go the other way. That's that's the that's
the message for today. That's your that's your ending message.
Speaker 3 (52:52):
All right, we will.
Speaker 1 (52:54):
We'll see you next time.
Speaker 3 (52:55):
Thank you.
Hunter. Which state in the United States? Of course? Which
state do you think gets the most amount of tornadoes
on average every single year?
Speaker 2 (00:15):
The state in the United States it gets the most
tornadoes every year on average. I part of me wants
to say Kansas, just to shout out the Wizard of Oz,
but because.
Speaker 3 (00:30):
That's my it's not a bad guess, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
My popular culture imagination. But I'm gonna guess Mississippi.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
Interesting. I well, it's neither Kansas nor Mississippi.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
So I've just got forty eight guesses left, right guesses.
Speaker 1 (00:47):
Well, you're you're not too far away from the state
that does actually get the most amount of tornadoes on average.
Of course there are yearly differences, and that's, you know,
something that we always have to account for. But the
most the state that gets the most man of tornadoes
is Texas.
Speaker 3 (01:01):
So a lot of tornadoes too, I should tip me
off a little bit.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
Yeah, it's a big state, and it's geographically it's in
something called Tornado Alley. Of course, we're going to talk
a little bit more about that and sort of the
nebulousness of sort of the borders of that region a
little bit later, but it is firmly within what we
call tornado Alley, which means it has the right kind
of geographic elements to create this very unique, very dangerous
(01:26):
and deadly phenomenon of the tornado.
Speaker 3 (01:29):
And so.
Speaker 1 (01:32):
The Kansas would also be part of Tornado Alley, along
with Oklahoma and a few other states. Mississippi and Alabama
are not quite a part of the traditional tornado alley, though.
We are going to talk about them because something very
unique is starting to happen to them and there's some
very you know, unfortunate realities that have come into play
(01:55):
with some of their tornado issues that don't quite hit
the other states in this way, and we're going to
talk all about that. Should be really fun, e said.
Speaker 3 (02:03):
Listener.
Speaker 1 (02:03):
If you're in already web which again you click on
this so you should be today we're going to talk
about tornadoes primarily because, for one, we are in the
middle of tornado season right spring summer. This is the
time when most tornadoes are happening. A lot of tornadoes
have already hit sort of the general region of Tornado
Alley and the United States, but also some big ones
(02:26):
have been very well known to have hit other regions
of the world. A big one that I'm thinking of
is one that hit the Guangzhou metropolitan region in southern China,
and that actually caused quite a bit of damage. We'll
talk a little bit about that tornado because there's some
interesting parts about China and their tornado issues that again
(02:46):
not quite the same as the United States, and those
happened to go with some development patterns. Again, we're going
to talk about that. The other reason why I wanted
to talk about kind of that I want to talk
about tornadoes is that there is a brand new twister
movie called Twisters just plural They just pluralized it, that
just came out. It came out the nineteenth July nineteenth,
(03:08):
as you're listening to this, this would be on the thirtieth,
so it's now about a week and a half old.
But you can go back and watch that movie and
get it more of a feel for this phenomenon that
we're talking about, which is interesting because while it's definitely
well known, and I think most people have an idea
of twisters in their head or tornadoes in their head
(03:29):
of what they look like, at least in this country,
I would say most people haven't really experienced them because
they don't happen in where most of the population of
the country lives. It's a very specific area, and we're
going to talk about that. So I think it's one
of those things where it's like it captures that imagination
(03:50):
of people, right, this phenomenon, this otherworldly phenomenon that comes
down and like connects the sky to the land and
creates this funnel of wind and storm and rain and
all that fun stuff. So we're going to talk about
that new or or we're talking about tornados because of
that that that movie that's just come out. I did
(04:12):
want to point out one thing because we're gonna talk
about this all the way. At the end of the
day's episode, the new movie apparently I haven't seen it yet,
apparently completely leaves out any mention of climate change, even
though it's about sort of storm patterns that are growing,
you know, incredibly strong and power. And we're going to
talk about tornadoes and climate change today. So we're we
(04:36):
are going to broach the subject and it's gonna be
I think a little bit interesting from what people are
going to be are going to expect, because well, you know,
I'm just gonna leave it at that. We're just gonna
it's a little hint. Stay until the end. We're gonna
talk about it.
Speaker 3 (04:48):
It's not. Yeah, it's not.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
It's not what you would think at all, and at
least it wasn't when I started my research. All that's
to say is, let's talk about some twisters, Hunter. So
first question, Hunter, I would love it if you could
just try and describe a tornado for listeners in case
they are unaware.
Speaker 2 (05:08):
Right, Well, I have to say first that I've never
I can't say that I've really experienced a tornado before,
although you know, I've seen lots of images, right, I've
seen I've seen the original movie Twister, seen the Wizard
of Oz. But I've also seen you know, these programs
on television where the storm chasers and they're chasing these things, right,
(05:29):
and then footage from dramatic footage from the news, and
it seems to be this sort of funnel of wind
that you know, whips around, this sort of skinny funnel
that sort of twists around, which is I guess why
they call it a twister, and kind of destroys most
of the things in its bath and knocks things over,
picks things up, and you know, projects them into the air.
(05:53):
Hundreds of feet.
Speaker 3 (05:54):
So that's that's what I'm getting from tornado.
Speaker 1 (05:58):
You know, I think you captued certainly, I think you
captured the popular imagination of a tornado, right, this idea
of of this spinning you know, whirlwind of well, this whirlwind,
this whirling of wind that you know, connects the sky
to the ground and then basically creates this path of destruction.
And that is true for some tornadoes. There's obviously who
(06:21):
a lot of and we're gonna get to some of
this a little bit, but there's a lot of tornadoes
out there that we won't cause really any damage at
all to anything sort of you know. I mean obviously
the you know, might lift up some bushes or something,
but it's it's gonna be relatively very mild amount of
damage and certainly nothing material to like buildings.
Speaker 3 (06:37):
Right.
Speaker 1 (06:37):
Most tornadoes, in fact, are pretty benign overall, or at
least a large chunk of them. And we're gonna talk
a little bit about that. But let's first let's go
high level. Let's talk about how a tornado even happens.
So we're gonna do a little bit of sciencey stuff. Again,
I'm not an expert. I'm pulling this information from another source,
And so I guess all that's to say is I'm
not I'm actually not a climatologist here. Who who? Who
(06:59):
can get too deep into this stuff? So bear with
me a little bit. So high level, a tornado is
a violently rotating column of air that is in contact
with both the surface of the Earth and a cumula
nimbus cloud, or, in rare cases, a cumulus cloud. Are
you familiar with either of these cloud types here?
Speaker 3 (07:17):
I know of them, probably should know this.
Speaker 2 (07:19):
I took some climatology classes, but obviously it was not
as attentive as maybe I could have been.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
Yeah, well, I'm not that surprised because I imagine most
people don't really know what a different cloud type is
because it's it is a very small section of a
specific science. A cumulonimbus cloud those are those if you've
seen a lot of clouds, those are those like really
(07:44):
big fat clouds. They sort of go very far wide
and very tall. Right, They're like just very big and
sort of they almost have like an oppressiveness about them.
You know, a lot of times they're like very gray
and dark and stormy. So those are cumulinimous it's because
there's was that foreboding. Yeah, yeah, and so they're just
they're they're up there, and these are the ones that
(08:05):
where a lot of water and weather has sort of condensed,
and that's why they look so well foreboating and you know,
thick for lack of a better word. And so the
tornado will largely funnel funnel out of these clouds for
that specific reason. Of course, as we've already mentioned, tornadoes
can often be referred to as a twister, whirlwind, or cyclone,
(08:27):
although the word cyclone is used in meteorology to name
a weather system rather than a single tornado, so keep
that in mind. Tornadoes also come in various shapes and sizes,
and they are often but not always visible, in the
form of condensation tunnel originating from the base of a
cumulanimous cloud. So all that's to say, there are tornadoes
that are basically invisible to the naked eye. And so
(08:51):
sometimes that happens where sometimes you'll see a video, right,
somebody is recording something. All of a sudden, the sign
or something gets picked up and sort of spins around
and gets thrown, you know, twenty meters away or twenty
feet away. That that's something that just happens, and that
was that was a tornado. It just wasn't visible to
sort of, you know, the naked eye. Most tornadoes in
(09:14):
at least inside the United States have wind speeds less
than one hundred and ten miles per hour, are about
two hundred and fifty feet across, and travel a few
miles before dissipating. These would be classified as minor tornadoes generally.
That still seems like fast.
Speaker 3 (09:30):
Yeah, it's still pretty fast, it's pretty windy.
Speaker 1 (09:34):
Yeah, it's still pretty windy, but it's not it's like
and it can cause some like minor damage. But when
you start to think about it's one hundred and ten
miles per hour, that is less than the mile per
hour of some of the lighter hurricanes, which again they'll
cause some damage, but they're not blowing you know, houses over,
not necessarily uprooting trees. It can happen, but it's just
(09:56):
it's pretty minor. And if you think about the width, right,
so it's two hundre and fifty feet across, again, that
seems really big. You know if you're looking at it,
you know you're standing at the basement. Of course, that's
going to look pretty big. But it's also pretty narrow, right,
so it's the chance that that tornado is going to
cause any damage, is going to hit on the right
spot and actually hit something is pretty slim.
Speaker 3 (10:16):
Now.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
That said, on the extreme end of the high end,
tornadoes can attain wind speeds of more than three hundred
miles per hour. Wow, can be more than two miles
in diameter, oh my goodness, and stay on the ground
for more than sixty miles before dissipating, So that that
gets a lot more destructive when you get one of
(10:37):
those bad boys.
Speaker 3 (10:38):
That's a big one.
Speaker 1 (10:39):
Yeah, that's a big one right now.
Speaker 3 (10:42):
That's that.
Speaker 1 (10:42):
I mean, if that landed in the middle of a city,
it could it would level large, large parts of the city,
which I do believe happened in Joplin back about ten
years ago, Joplin, Missouri, where it basically carved the big
path through that that that town, that city. Various types
of tornadoes would include the multiple vortex tornado, the land spout,
(11:03):
and the water spout. And so these are they kind
of sound it's basically what they sound like. So multiple
vortex tornadoes have two or more vortex columns that originate
from the same cloud. They kind of look they do,
they kind of look pretty cool. They're usually typically weaker
than a normal tornado. I don't know if that's the
case for all of them, but that's sort of what
the data that I saw. And then there's land spouts
(11:26):
and water spouts, which are more narrow tornadoes, so very
very thin and are generally pretty weak, but still form
sort of that column that you can see. The difference
between them, of course, is that one is on land
and the other one is on water. A water spout,
of course, is taking up a lot. So if you
look at a tornado that's on land, a lot of
the debris that's pulling up, it's gonna be a lot
(11:47):
of dirt, and that ends up being one of the
things that's really destructive, especially to humans, right because these
little things can hit you and cause a lot of damage.
A water vortex is obviously not pulling up dirt. It's
gonna be pulling up water, and so has that sort
of effect to it. Some other tornado like phenomena that
exists in nature would include the gust nato, the dust devil,
(12:10):
the firewhorl, which sounds particularly scary. I don't ever want
to see a fireworld, right, and then the steam devil,
which I have also never seen a steam devil, I
can't say that. So my grandparents used to live in
the deserts of Nevada, and as such I did see
a lot of dust devils out there. Have you ever
(12:30):
seen a dust devil?
Speaker 3 (12:31):
I believe I have. Yeah, yeah, it's not I.
Speaker 1 (12:34):
Would say most people.
Speaker 2 (12:35):
Who it's interesting, but it's not quite as intimidating as
the three hundred mile per hour storm you've described before.
Speaker 1 (12:42):
Right, Well, And it's like the primary difference and the
reason why these are tornado like they're not they're not
actually tornadoes, but they're tornado like in that they create
like a little funnel system. You can sort of see
them blowing around. They're usually pretty small, right, So the
dust devils I've seen have never been really larger than
a human being, right, like a foot six foot tall
human being. The reason why they're not technically tornadoes is
(13:04):
because they're not forming out of a clouds. They're not
technically connecting the sky to the earth right in the
same way that a tornado is. Instead, it's just creating
a little phenomenon, usually some very highly localized you know,
shifting of sort of what pressure systems combined with wind
and it just sort of gets caught up in itself
and it'll blow something around for a little bit, usually dust,
(13:27):
that's all. It is a fire what was called a firewhirl?
Speaker 3 (13:32):
Right? Where do my notes go?
Speaker 1 (13:35):
So? Yeah, fireworld, the fireworld I have. So I actually
didn't look this up because it was sort of just
this is just a footnote, but I'm going to look
it up right now because now I'm curious possibly be
so here it is. It's a firewhirl or fire devil
is a whirlwind induced by a fire and often at
least partially composed of flame or ash. These start with
(13:56):
a whirlwind, often made visible by smoke, and may occur
when intense rising heat and turbulent wind conditions combined to
form whirling eddies of air, and these eddies can contract
a tornado like vortex. It sucks in debris and combustible gases.
And so there's a picture here which it does look
very scary, and it seems like these are mostly due
(14:18):
to wildfires that are occurring that have sort of mimicked
similar scenarios where there's pressure systems and winds blowing through
and then it just captures some of that fire and
will blow it around into a very scary phenomenon that
I definitely never want to see.
Speaker 3 (14:35):
I don't want to win, but yeah, I'd be okay
with with missing that. I think.
Speaker 1 (14:42):
Now, obviously, as humans hunter, we like to measure things, right,
That's true to argue that we like to try and
measure everything as we possibly can, and so we have
created a whole system of measurement just for tornadoes. Have
you ever heard of of actually we have two, we
have two measure Have you ever heard of the Fujita scale?
Speaker 2 (15:03):
If by any chance you know, this is going to
shock you to learn that I'm not familiar with the
Fujia scale.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
You know, it's funny because if if you watch that
the old movie Twister, yeah, not the new one Twisters,
they do mention the Fujita scale in it, or at
least they mentioned like the the the different scales of right,
they're they're they're track, they're tracking these tornadoes. You know
one's an f's you know zero ones an F one
as an F two something like that. Right, They're like, oh,
(15:29):
we got to go find this F four, you know, tornado.
We Gotta storm Chase it, and so I.
Speaker 2 (15:35):
Watched that one again to pick to glean these kinds
of facts up and to prepare for the new movie
as well.
Speaker 1 (15:40):
Of course, yeah, I would be curious, and we're gonna
talk about this. I'd be curious to know if the
new movie mentions the scale, and if they do, if
they mentioned the old scale or the new scale, because
I think, well, we're gonna let's talk about it. So
we have these two scales, Fujita Scale and the Enhanced
Fujita Scale, and they're more commonly referred to on its
sort of their numeric scale, preceded by either F or
(16:02):
EF so F zero, F one, F two or EF
you know, blah blah blah blah blah. The Enhanced Fujita
Scale was created to reflect better examinations of tornado damage
surveys in order to align wind speeds more closely with
what the expected and associated damage would be. So we're
going to we'll see sort of how that that sort
of plays out when we get into sort of some
(16:23):
of the different scaling here. But I did want to
call out that there is a geography that's attached to
these scaling systems as well. Because not every country uses
the same scale anymore, if you can believe it. So,
the United States and Canada have adopted and now used
the enhanced Fujita scale since two thousand and seven and
twenty thirteen, respectively. The rest of the world still uses
(16:47):
the older Fujita scale. Apparently, However, in my research, the
enhanced Fujita scale is being being more widely used, perhaps
more locally rather than sort of nationally adopted, but it's
it is being used in other places outside of the
US and Canada as well, I guess I just want
to point that out officially, though it's only Canada in
the US they use this new scale. To me, though,
(17:10):
this probably makes sense, and we're going to talk about
why later in today's episode, but it makes sense that,
in my opinion, that Canada and the US specifically would
move to something that's perhaps a little bit more accurate
and perhaps more damage focused.
Speaker 3 (17:24):
Okay, yeah, a little more nuanced, perhaps.
Speaker 1 (17:27):
A little more nuance. Yeah, So we'll talk a little
bit about that, but let's go through each scale because
they're a little bit different. So Fujia scale tornadoes are
broken down on a scale of F zero to F six.
So this would be used to determine the damage broadly
of any given tornado. It's just not aligned quite correctly
because it's a little bit older. And so a tornado
(17:48):
at the scale of F zero would have a wind
speed of less than seventy two miles per hour and
would be expected to cause light damage. Light damage being
this has ripped up a bush, right, there's no more
on this tree, that kind of thing.
Speaker 3 (18:02):
Very light.
Speaker 1 (18:03):
This, of course then ramps up right, so an F
one would have wind speeds between seventy three and one
hundred and twelve miles per hour create more damage. F
two one hundred and thirteen to one hundred and fifty
seven miles per hour caused significant damage at that point,
and F three would be one hundred and fifty eight
to two hundred and six miles per hour cause even
more damage. And then we get two sort of the
(18:23):
higher end scales, which would be F four, where now
you have tornadoes that have wind speeds of between two hundred,
two hundred and seven and two hundred and sixty miles
per hour. And this is where the damage now turns
into a more catastrophic level. Right, this is no longer
just a home here or there, which obviously is catastrophic
for those individuals, but not necessarily for our whole community
(18:45):
or city. F four is where you start to hit
those levels, and then you get to the f F five,
which has mile per hour speeds of between two hundred
and sixty one and three hundred and eighteen miles per hour,
and these are the ones where well, again, if we
go back to our Twister movie from the mid nineteen nineties,
that's the biggie, right, that's the one that ends up
causing all the damage in is like the big it's
(19:06):
the big bad of the episode.
Speaker 3 (19:07):
It's like the bad.
Speaker 2 (19:08):
Category five is maybe the way they referred to it
or something like that.
Speaker 1 (19:12):
Right, yeah, yeah, yeah, And so there is So there's
there's an F six earthquake or not earthquake tornado. There's
an F six tornado that would have windspeed greater than
three hundred and eighteen miles per hour, and this would
cause role really, it would cause inconceivable damage. And the
reason why it will cause inconceivable damage is because there
have been no recorded F six tornadoes to have landed
(19:36):
anywhere on the planet within the modern history, the recorded history, So.
Speaker 2 (19:39):
It could have happened, and it could still happen, but
since we've been using the scale, there haven't been any.
Speaker 1 (19:48):
There haven't been any, yep. But there have been a
lot of F five tornadoes. So the US has had,
or the world has had sixty seven F five tornadoes
recorded in total, of which fifty nine of those have
hit within the United States.
Speaker 3 (20:02):
Well that's most of them. Yeah, wow, that's most of them.
Speaker 1 (20:06):
Yes, So now you can kind of understand why the
US might be leaning towards a scale that's perhaps a
little bit more nuanced towards what kind of damage can expect.
So that's where the Enhanced Fujia scale comes in, and
it's broken out between well, still six scales, but this
time it's between E FU and then through e F
five so EF zero one, two, three, four five. It's
(20:27):
the same basic sort of system, except the mile per
hours are a little bit different. So in e FU,
this is basically means they don't they don't know how
fast the wind speeds were going because it was just
not really it wasn't big enough to really be trapped,
so it's no surveyable damage whatsoever. And then it goes
up from there, so EF zero sixty five to eighty five,
e F one eighty six to one hundred and ten,
(20:49):
e F two one hundred and eleven to one hundred
and thirty five, e F three one hundred thirty six
to one hundred and sixty five, e F four one
hundred and sixty six to two hundred and then the
e F five, the biggest bad of them all, would
be anything above two hundred miles per hour. This would
be a little different from the Fujia scale because there
are top end here is now tornadoes that are that
(21:13):
are that happened you know, quite often, right, not super common,
but there's no longer a scale where it's like, we
don't have any any sort of track records, so I
don't have account of how many EF fives there have been,
but I can tell you based on the science that
approximately one half of a one half of zero point
one percent, so a very small fraction of global tornadoes
(21:35):
are e F fives. The most common would be the
EF zero, followed by the EF one you know, make
up about eighty three to eighty five percent of all tornadoes. Okay, wow,
I've said a lot about tornadoes already. If you can
believe it, we already have to hit our very first
ad break here, and I really hope listener that it
is an ad for Twisters for you right now, because
(21:58):
I just like to think that our ads were in
conjection with our episode topics. I don't know, So anyways,
go listen to these ads and maybe one will be
for the movie, and you'll go watch the movie and
we'll be right back, and we're back. This is the
(22:21):
Geography Is Everything Podcast. We're talking all about tornadoes today.
We've been lost talking about the movie Twister. We talk
about the movie Twisters. We're gonna keep talking a little
bit about both those movies as we go through this.
But I wanted to take a moment at the beginning
of this part of our episode to talk about more
specifically about where tornadoes strike. So, Hunter, where would you
expect tornadoes to hit around the world.
Speaker 2 (22:46):
Well, I'm based on what we learned in the first
part of the episode, the United States pretty popular spot
for tornadoes to hit. And I'm thinking sort of the
the midwestern spine of the United States is where a
lot of them are.
Speaker 1 (23:00):
That that is where the popular sort of idea of
where tornadoes hit. That's that that that is and that's true,
right like that, that's a lot of tornadoes hit that region.
And I would say that maybe it's a US bias
that that we have here in this country. Maybe there is,
you know, just because it does happen very frequently within
the United States, particularly within that area. There is a
(23:23):
popular misconception that tornadoes generally only strike the US, aside
from rare, sort of freak sort of incidents outside of
the United States. That said, tornadoes are actually not as
unique as that as as maybe that misconception leads people
to believe or that that idea. So every single continent
(23:44):
aside from Antarctica, has had a tornado hit somewhere within
it to some degree of strength within the last year.
So there's no place that has not had a tornado.
And these are actual tornadoes, not dust devils, not you
know whatever. These are actual you know, full spouts, you know,
connecting sky to the land. But that's not to say
that all tornadoes are created equally, and I think that's
(24:05):
sort of again that leads people to believe that a
lot of tornadoes are hit you know, tornadoes only hit
the United States. Because there are roughly seven places where
tornadoes happen most frequently so the United States and Canada.
Tornadoes hit basically basically everywhere inside the United States and Canada,
right every We'll talk a little about this, but every
state has had a tornado.
Speaker 3 (24:26):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (24:28):
Northern Mexico also gets a fair amount of tornadoes, mostly
within the sort of same area that would be connecting
into the you know what we would call the tornado alley.
We will talk more about tornado alley in a little bit.
So let's move on from the United States, Canada, in Australia,
particularly along the eastern coast, but sometimes on the West
coast as well. Okay, in East Asia, primarily in the Philippines, Japan,
(24:53):
and China. China is very interesting because they don't tend
to get a lot of tornadoes, but so when they do,
they tend to be very destructive and they tend to
hit urbanized areas far more often. So, for example, I
mentioned earlier, you know a tornado that hit the Guangzhou
metro area nineteen million people, and it basically flattened an
entire industrial area of the city. And so it's when
(25:16):
this happens to China, it typically tends to be far
more destructive than say, tornado alley, but that's a large
in large part just due to the fact that there's
a lot more people living in China and it's hitting
in an area that happens to be a lot more
developed than tornado alley.
Speaker 2 (25:31):
Right, So China's tornado alley has more people in it,
that's what's happening.
Speaker 1 (25:35):
Probably, Yeah, but they don't really have a tornado alley.
They like, they get some tornadoes, it's just not it's
not frequent enough in a single area, it's not as concentrated,
and most places don't really have a tornado alley. There's
a reason why tornado alley exists very specifically. There's there's
a combination of geographic elements that occur that don't really
(25:56):
occur in the same place to the same degree. Again,
we're gonna talk about.
Speaker 3 (26:01):
That in a minute.
Speaker 1 (26:02):
Continuing on, tornadoes will hit in eastern India and Bangladesh.
They will hit in Southern Africa within the country of
South Africa, but also Les Sootho and Eswatini broadly. Europe
gets a lot of tornadoes, including Ireland and the United Kingdom.
Typically a lot of times they hit inside the water,
so they're not quite as well known though, and then
(26:24):
in South America around Buenos Aires area of Argentina, and
then and then up into Uruguay they will also get
some tornadoes there. So while tornadoes are not uncommon in
many parts of the world, the United States in particular
stands out as being the country that gets the most
tornadoes every year had a power that most other regions
(26:47):
of the world rarely experience. And so this is sort
of what I was talking about earlier. So, like I
already mentioned, every state in the US, including Puerto Rico
and Washington, d C. Has had a tornado touch ground
at some point between nineteen fifty and nineteen or nineteen
fifty and twenty twenty one. I think that was the
most recent data I could find. Maybe there's some twenty
twenty two data out there now. And overall, during that
(27:12):
span of seventy one years, over sixty seven thousand tornadoes
have touch ground somewhere in the United States.
Speaker 3 (27:19):
That's a whole lot, lot of tornadoes.
Speaker 1 (27:20):
Yeah, that's a lot of tornados. So that would translate
to roughly nine hundred and sixty five tornadoes hitting every
single year if we look at only the last twenty years.
So that number does increase to about one thousand, two
hundred and thirty tornadoes every year. That might make you
think that climate change has something to do with it.
In fact, it's actually more likely just because we're able
(27:42):
to record and track tornadoes with a higher degree of efficiency.
So we're going to talk a little about that later. Europe, however, does,
like I had mentioned, does get quite a lot of tornadoes.
So they get about seven hundred tornadoes per year. That's
a bunch, yeah, But again, a lot of the power
of the tornadoes in Europe are typically much smaller, so
they're not as newsworthy for lack of a better term,
(28:04):
And many of Europe's tornadoes actually tend to be these
warrants which we've already covered and are far weaker, and
they take place over water, so they're not really causing
any damage aside from you know, if you have a
fishing vessel inside of its.
Speaker 3 (28:15):
Path, then that'll that's bad, that'll.
Speaker 1 (28:17):
Cause a mass yep. Yeah. And so this leads us
to tornado alley hunter, what do you where? Would you say?
Tornado alley is like, can you give us? Can you
map us out? Map us a geographic boundary of this place?
Speaker 3 (28:32):
All right.
Speaker 2 (28:33):
My My guess is Tornado Alley could is probably a
loosely defined kind of area, so it could include different places.
But I'm thinking that a lot of Texas, Central Texas
into Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakota's reaching over into Iowa, Illinois, Missouri, Arkansas,
(28:55):
maybe as far down as Louisiana and Mississippi.
Speaker 3 (28:59):
Maybe I'm drawing it too widely, but something like that,
and then maybe reaching as far north into Canada as well.
Speaker 1 (29:06):
You know, it is funny because you hit on something
that I think I almost immediately wanted to cover, and
is that this is a this is a loosely defined,
you know, region rights depending on who you are, right,
It's it's not there's no there's no one meteorologist or
you know, the National Oceanic Administration Atmosphere and Administration like
(29:26):
they haven't drawn like this is this is Tornado Alley
and everything. I felt like that's that doesn't exist. It
is broadly just a swath of area within more commonly
associated with the states of Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa,
and South Dakota that we encompassed this area. So you
(29:47):
you you got all of those states, you did include
I think it was Missouri and Arkansas and maybe even Louisiana.
These are all states that get tornadoes too, right, Missouri,
Missouri not is not technically well, it's not commonly associated
with tornado alley. I would argue that it is still
very much a part of it because they still get
(30:08):
a lot of tornadoes, and they can tend to be
very destructive in Missouri, just as they can in Kansas.
Speaker 3 (30:14):
Right.
Speaker 2 (30:14):
Yeah, you know, I remember reading a short piece by
David Foster Wallace who talks about playing tennis and tornado alley.
But he's located in I think Illinois at that point,
so for him, that's that's tornado Alley. But again, that's
vernacular region.
Speaker 3 (30:31):
People can imagine it the way they.
Speaker 1 (30:32):
Want exactly, So regardless of sort of how you cut
in slice tornado alley. If we just take those those
six states that I had mentioned as being sort of
the most commonly referred to as I would again be Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa,
and South Dakota. If we just take those six states,
those states have received thirty seven percent of all recorded
(30:55):
tornadoes in the United States. So that's that's a big
chunk yep of them. Right, of sixty seven thousand tornadoes,
that's a lot of tornadoes. And this is due to
a very specific set of geographic circumstances that this region
in particular gets hit with most. And so let's talk
(31:19):
about this because again this is very unique to the
United States. So tornadoes they form out of large thunderstorms.
I don't think that's a big surprise here. So inside
those storms, there's this warm, humid air that's rising while
cool air starts to fall. Right, This is sort of
what creates that funnel system and that sort of starts
(31:39):
the spinning. Right, these sort of mix of mix of
pressure systems that are going on, and it's this region
that happens to get the ingredients to create that exact
kind of storm system almost perfectly. So Tornado Alley exists
at the confluence of three sort of geographic weather systems.
So coming in from the north is a front of cold,
(32:02):
dry air from Canada, the jet Stream and the Rocky
Mountains that's sort of pushing its way south into this region. Okay,
from the southwest. At the same time, you have this
sort of gust of warm, dry air pushing in from
the Mojave and Sonoran and sort of the Chihuahuan deserts
of northern Mexico up into this region. Right, it's moving
(32:24):
up into sort of this Texas, Oklahoma Kansas area. And
then finally, the missing ingredient that a lot of places
don't have at the same time is a heavy dose
of warm, moist air that is moving in from the
Gulf of Mexico up into this same exact region. And
(32:47):
so when you get these three elements to combine, you
sort of have the right concoction to create these really
massive thunderstorms which then are able to combine into to
create this funnel system. I think that is so interesting
because tornado alleys simply wouldn't exist if, you know, let's say,
(33:08):
the Rocky Mountains weren't there, or the Mohabbi Desert wasn't there,
or the Gulf of Mexico wasn't there. And the Gulf
of Mexico is particularly interesting because it's a very large
body of water that happens to be very warm, and
it happens to, you know, be able to create these
concoctions in a level that not very many other places
in the world can, and so no other region in
(33:29):
the world really has all three of these required and
ingredients as prominently as the United States. And that's why,
you know, if we go back to our Fujiita scale,
you know, f five tornadoes, I believe there was sixty
seven total inside the world, and I think it was
like fifty nine of them hit inside the United States.
Speaker 3 (33:47):
And that's the reason why. Yeah, yeah, well that adds up. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (33:52):
Yeah. It's just it's so interesting, right, It's like all
these different things, how does this how does this happen?
Like how does how do these things come together? It's like, well, well,
there's there.
Speaker 3 (34:01):
It is.
Speaker 1 (34:01):
It's like it's all like plane is It's almost like
plane is English. If you if you just like know
what these things are doing, you're like, oh yeah, I
get it now, like dry air, cold cold, very cold air,
very hot, dry air, and very wet, moist, humid air.
And it's like you smash all this together, that's gonna
cause some issues for the Star. Yeah, yeah, exactly. But
(34:22):
here's where things kind of get a little more interesting, Hunter,
because while Tornado Alley does get a lot of tornadoes,
and we've covered that already, as it turns out, it
is actually one of the safer areas to be in
with respects to regions that have a high amount of
tornado activity. So Texas, for example, has approximately one third
(34:44):
the average annual amount of deaths caused by tornadoes than Alabama,
despite Texas having many more tornadoes per year. Why do
you think this might be?
Speaker 3 (34:57):
I guess.
Speaker 2 (34:58):
My guess is that there are more people living in
sort of marginal circumstances closer to places where tornadoes are hitting,
so and then maybe the infrastructure is not as fired up,
and so the damage that is done is more significant
than it would be, for example, in Texas.
Speaker 3 (35:16):
That's my guess.
Speaker 1 (35:18):
That is that's a that's a great guess, and I
am neither going to confirm nor deny it because before
we do that, we have to hit our last ad.
Brak Oh, I got a little bit of an We
all got to wait, all right, we all got to wait.
So come back after the ad break, listen to these ads.
Hopefully it's another Twisters ad, and come back and we'll
talk a little bit about whether Hunter was right or wrong.
(35:38):
So I guess, I guess we'll be all right back
and we're back. This is the Geography Is Everything Podcast.
We just ran through a bunch of tornado information. We
just ran through all about tornado Alley, and I left
you with a little bit of a cliffhanger where I
(35:59):
asked Hunter, what the why Alabama might have might be
more dangerous with respects to tornadoes than Texas, and you
would mention what was what did you mention again about that?
Speaker 2 (36:09):
My response dealt with that there are probably more people
perhaps in uh more people in the line of tornadoes
to begin with, but also living in conditions that are
less secure. Perhaps maybe has something to do with the
proximity to two bodies of water or something like that.
(36:31):
But yeah, I'm thinking it's mostly like sociological kind of
stuff going on here.
Speaker 1 (36:36):
Well, you're you're you are partially right, We're gonna there's
there's actually multiple reasons, as there always usually is so,
and luckily there's a geographic answer for us, because we're
a geography podcasts are always fun. So let's go let's
go back a little bit before I fully answer the question.
Let's talk a little about Alabama and Mississippi more broadly,
so that we can sort of get an idea of
(36:56):
you know, how are they getting tornadoes because they're not
they are a little departed from Arnado Alley, but they
are getting tornadoes. So overall these two states they account
for about seven percent of all tornadoes in the country.
Not a huge amount necessarily, but I would argue still
a significant amount, yes, And they experience these storms for
largely the same reason as Tornado Alley. Right, the cold
(37:18):
air from Canada, the warm air from the Mojave desert
Snorin Desert, and then the moist air from the Gulf
of Mexico. Same ingredients sort of being pulled together, but
they occur less frequently because the cold northern air from
Canada doesn't often reach as far south as it does Kansas, Nebraska,
or even Texas.
Speaker 3 (37:37):
It's missing often missing one of those ingredients.
Speaker 1 (37:41):
It's often missing one of those key ingredients, and it
typically tends to be that cold air. But when a
tornado does hit these two states, things can get a
little dicey. So you see, there are three primary reasons
why Alabama specifically Alabama, but this would also include Miami,
but or not Miami, Mississippi. Alabama specifically has a much
(38:01):
higher fatality rate when it comes to tornadoes than say Texas.
And the first is that, as it turns out, most
tornadoes that hit the Southeast tend to be nocturnal tornadoes.
So this is because tornadoes tend to strike in the
Southeast in the early spring when there are fewer hours
in the day. And so a tornado that hits at night, well,
(38:22):
people tend to be sleeping, right, they tend to be
less active, less aware or even you know, just they're
just not seeing any as much, right, They're not noticing
that there's even a storm.
Speaker 3 (38:33):
Perhaps they're inside.
Speaker 1 (38:35):
Perhaps, yeah, they're inside. And so this creates issues when
you need to get people into shelter quickly. So there's
that aspect. The second reason though, is simply and you
this is sort of what you were alluding to, is
simply that the Southeast is far more built up and
developed than the Great Plains States. Right, So if you
(38:55):
look at a map, let's listener, go google the and
if you're watching on youtube'll be here in front of you.
But go google like a nighttime aerial map of the
United States, and you can see all of the lights
that are, you know, go throughout the unit that pop
up throughout the country where there's some sort of population center,
and you can you can see that line that sort
(39:16):
of hits where all of a sudden, there's no there's
no more development. It's almost like a very broad stroke
and sort of this area, this big swath from north
to south where it's like where did all the people go?
Of course there are people living there, but it's just
far fewer.
Speaker 3 (39:28):
Right.
Speaker 1 (39:30):
Alabama and Mississippi are firmly within the region where there's
a lot of development. So you can start to see, Okay,
a tornado pops down in Alabama, far likely, far far
higher chance that is going to hit where people are
actually living, versus the Great Plains, where there's actually a
pretty sizable chance that's going to hit nowhere, just like
in the middle of a field somewhere middle of grassy
(39:52):
plains mm hm, not.
Speaker 2 (39:55):
Doing as much damage and not as not as big
a cost to human well be being a human life.
Speaker 1 (40:01):
Absolutely and finally, and this is kind of similar to
the last reason, but the natural geography of the Southeast
does create more hazards for when a tornado does inevitably hit,
So Alabama and Mississippi they tend to have more trees,
which will you know, when a tornado hits them, will
be picked up and typically thrown around, and that causes
(40:22):
a lot of damage. I'm sure somebody's seen. Most people
have seen sort of one of those iconic images of
sort of like a tree branch. It's like now in
the middle of like a fence because it's sort of
like was thrown at such a high speed that sort
of busted right through and sort of very I don't know,
uncanny a little bit. It's like, how did that even happen? Yeah,
And there's like still leaves on it somehow, and you're like, wow,
that's weird.
Speaker 3 (40:42):
And wood is heavy, so yeah, I can do some damage.
Speaker 1 (40:46):
Wood is heavy, tends to be tends to be a
lot of damage when it hits things.
Speaker 3 (40:51):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (40:52):
The other thing, though, is that the area of Alabama
tends to have a lot of rolling hills, Okay, and
these are able to hide oncoming tornadoes in ways that
they can't and they don't really in the Great Plants,
which don't have the same kind of rolling topography. And
so for these three reasons, this region, these two states
(41:15):
tend to have a much deadlier history than places that
get more frequent and oftentimes even more powerful tornadoes. And
it's just the natural geography of and and the human
geography of where we've built, right, these are these are
things that have all occurred, that we've all done, and
sort of that creates this system where the tornado is
(41:35):
going to just cause a lot more damage. And so
all of this creates an area where you know, that
has fewer tornadoes with a far deadlier record than Tornado Alley.
And so now let's let's go back to sort of
what I was talking about early on the beginning of
the episode, leave behind Tornado Alley a little bit and
talk more broadly about tornadoes and climate change. So, if
(41:58):
you recall at the beginning of that, so we were
talking about this Twisters movie, and that movie very intently
focuses on an ever increasing amount of power of tornadoes
and damage of these megastorms that are causing I haven't
seen it, but I'm assuming it's very like intense and
suspenseful and all this stuff. But apparently so the movie
(42:21):
neglects to mention climate change even once it's completely left
out of the equation. And this was done because the
director apparently didn't want to be political, didn't want this
to be a political statement. X y Z. I think
we can both agree that that is probably political into itself.
Speaker 3 (42:39):
It's in and of itself a political statement.
Speaker 1 (42:41):
I agree, because I mean, it's climate change. Is it's
a thing, it's happening, it's whatever. Unfortunately, as it turns out,
the director may have actually made the right call, though
I would argue for the wrong reason.
Speaker 3 (42:58):
Okay, to break it down.
Speaker 1 (43:01):
So let's break it down. So climate change, so so okay,
let's go back and back a little bit.
Speaker 3 (43:08):
So.
Speaker 1 (43:09):
According to the to a National Geographic article on the subject,
climate change's impact on the frequency, power, and duration of
tornadoes is complex and not well understood yet even to
this day. This is an article from twenty twenty three.
It didn't have an author, which I thought was weird.
I think it was just sort of one of those
(43:30):
their boilerplate explainer things. I just wanted to call that out.
Not leaving out an author, it just didn't include one.
But according to this article, predicting how climate change affects
tornadoes is difficult due to their relatively small size, short life,
and short short lifespans compared to other extreme weather events
such as hurricanes. So instead, scientists have been focusing on
how climate change alters the conditions necessary for super cell thunderstorms.
(43:56):
Those are the things that caused this stuff, right, those
you know, produces the tornadoes. And so these conditions again,
they include warm, moist air and unstable atmosphere and wind shear.
Climate change increases atmospheric instability, but apparently it's also it's
also been seen to decrease wind shear, so this makes
(44:17):
it hard to predict the net effect on tornado formation.
So they're sort of in a way canceling each other
out right. Climate change is increasing the instability of the
atmosphere up there, but the wind shear is actually going down.
So you need both of these and high quantities to
create the tornado. So this is sort of where scientists
(44:39):
are stumbling over themselves a little bit. It's like, well,
climate change is happening, it's a thing, but are they
having an impact on tornadoes? It's not really, they can't
really figure that out yet. Now, studies do suggest that
climate change might lead to more severe thunderstorms, but again
that doesn't necessarily mean tornadoes, as only a fraction of
(44:59):
super sales actually produced tornadoes. So again, you know, we
might see you know, one aspect of the tornado system
come into play, but it might now ever, create the
necessary conditions for an actual tornado two to hit the ground.
And again, if we go back to sort of what
when we had that full count of tornadoes, you know
I mentioned, No, there's one thousand, two hundred and sixty
(45:20):
five tornadoes on average per year since nineteen ninety. A
lot of people point to that as a reason for oh, well,
clearly there's an increase in tornadoes. But again, just to
call it out, the technology that has gone into tracking
tornadoes has improved dramatically since nineteen ninety, and so we're
able to track them much more frequently. So there could
have been throughout the fifty sixty seventies, there could have
(45:42):
been more tornadoes that we just weren't tracking. Obviously there were,
we didn't have the same technology to track them, and
there were fewer people to even look at them.
Speaker 3 (45:49):
Right.
Speaker 1 (45:49):
There's a lot more people now than there were in
nineteen sixty or nineteen seventy.
Speaker 2 (45:53):
Right, so there's a lot more incidences of recording them.
And I mean this is also an illustration of something
we've talked about a few times before on the program,
which is that the climate change is real and it's
having some very significant effects. However, not everything that has
to do with the weather is necessarily related.
Speaker 3 (46:12):
To climate change, right, Like that.
Speaker 2 (46:15):
If something extreme happens, it may or may not be
related to climate change. It sounds like there's a lot
of research going on, so we you know, we should
acknowledge climate change, but we do ourselves a disservice if
we just assume that everything that everything that's cataclysmically is
happening is necessarily related to.
Speaker 1 (46:31):
It, exactly right. So all this is to say, Hunter,
is that recent research is inconclusive on sort of the
direct impacts of climate change on tornadoes, but it is
showing that tornado patterns are changing. So there are now
apparently fewer days that have at least one tornado, but
(46:55):
more days that have multiple tornadoes, so leading to clustered
events clustered tornado events. There are some geographic shifts indicate
that fewer tornadoes are hitting Tornado Alley, but more in
the southeastern United States such as Alabama and Mississippi. But
these changes might not they might be linked to climate change,
(47:16):
or they might not be right. So it's difficult to distinguish,
you know, individual events as you were mentioning just now,
from climate variations in climate change from events that have
been happening for a lot longer, such as events like
El Nino or La Nina, right, and you know, maybe
then you can trace that that, you know, there's more
(47:38):
Al Nina or more La Nina's related to climate change.
But it's it's starting to get a little too far
departed from these very you know, small, relatively small, isolated
events to be able to draw these big fat lines too.
So one last thing. According to the National Climate Assessment,
while some extreme weather can be directly attributed to global war,
(48:00):
the link between climate change and tornadoes remains uncertain. So
this is from our National Climate sort of governing body.
Climate change does result in warmer, wetter world that will
affect extreme weather events, but they don't know whether they
don't know whether that's actually causing an impact on tornadoes.
(48:22):
And so that's all I really have to say about
tornadoes today. It's been a lot of windy, gusty talk, I.
Speaker 2 (48:30):
Don't know, crazy conversation. Yeah, no, it's I'm realizing now
that I didn't know a lot of this stuff. So
it's good that I was here to listen to you
because I just learned a lot.
Speaker 1 (48:43):
Well, Hunter, tornadoes can't hit Oregon, but it's pretty rare,
so we probably won't have to deal with one and
if one does ever hit, and actually I think one
hit a couple of years ago. I remember seeing a
video on it. I think it was somewhere down like
in Salem area, which is listener if you're not aware
of Oregon geography or cities, it's you know, about forty
(49:04):
five minutes south of Portland. Anyways, it was pretty small.
I think it picked up like I think like I
saw it, like pick up and move a car like
a few feet. Well it's like sort of lifted one
end and like dropped it, not like fully off and
just picked up one side. Still, though, it's that's not nothing, right,
It's still.
Speaker 3 (49:22):
Like messed up your transmission for sure, you know, I.
Speaker 1 (49:25):
Mean absolutely yeah, but overall relatively mild. So while this
has been an easy, breezy discussion of tornadoes, I'm not
super we don't have to necessarily be worried too much
about it. And those of you who are in Tornado
Alley or within the southeast, hopefully you are better prepared
than you know. Certainly we are here with your various
alert systems. So anyways, Hunter, where can people find you
(49:49):
if they want to do that, or just tell people
who you are.
Speaker 3 (49:51):
Thanks, Jeff. I'm Hunter Showby.
Speaker 2 (49:53):
I'm a professor of geography at Portland State University. I'm
co author of Portland's a Cultural Atlas and Upper Left
City is a Cultural Atlast of San Francisco, Portland and Seattle.
And with you, Jeff, I'm host co host of the
Geography Is Everything podcast what you're listening to right now.
Speaker 1 (50:11):
Yeah, my name's Jeff Gibson. I'm also the co host
of this podcast. Really fun talking all about tornadoes today.
It's really fun talking about everything, all the geography we
had to talk about. If you want to find me
elsewhere around the web, you can mover on YouTube. That's
YouTube dot com slash Little Last Sign Geography by Jeff,
and you can listen to or you can watch all
the videos I've created. You can also listen to my
other podcasts now Around the World with Jeff, where I
(50:33):
just talk about different countries and states and provinces and
I have a guest who is from that place, and
so they sort of help walk us through it, and
you sort of get the perspective of somebody who's.
Speaker 3 (50:45):
Nice there, the local knowledge Yeah.
Speaker 1 (50:47):
A local knowledge or at least somebody who has significant
experience with it. I shouldn't say now, everybody's always going
to be in the place that they're talking about, and
that's that's fine. Sure, go check that out around the world.
You can listen on every podcast app you want, or
on YouTube on my my same YouTube channel. If you
like this conversation on tornadoes and you learn something, you
really enjoyed it, you learned, learn learned, you really enjoyed
(51:09):
learning all about sort of tornado alley and the unique
geographic aspects of that place in the planet, then please
like and subscribe over on YouTube if you're watching there,
or rate and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Good Pods, podcecasts,
any of these, you know, wonderful apps that are out there,
really helps us out. It's really fun seeing those, and
you know, I read each one, and you know, people
(51:30):
are usually highly complimentary. If you want this to deliver
directly into your email, you can. That's just over on
geography as Everything dot substack dot com. So go and
sign up over there, totally free. Check it out next
week hunter, I'm trying to get a little parched here.
Speaker 3 (51:45):
Yeah, it's like talking next week.
Speaker 1 (51:48):
We're going to tackle one of the largest corporations in
the world. This is this is actually gonna be your
app so you're gonna be.
Speaker 3 (51:54):
Leading this one.
Speaker 1 (51:56):
It's all about Nestle.
Speaker 2 (51:57):
It's all about Nestle, and it is the largest food
company in the world, I believe, and has been around
for a while and has made some pretty big impacts
in different parts of the world. So truly transnational. And
so there's there's a lot of geographies of Nesli to
talk about.
Speaker 1 (52:15):
Yeah, and some I mean just just based on what
I know. I'm not even I've not done any of
the research for this episode, but just based on what
I know, it has a very dark and destructive history,
particularly with some some very specific regions of the.
Speaker 3 (52:28):
World that I know.
Speaker 2 (52:29):
There's some controversial aspects to what they've been selling and
where they've been selling it.
Speaker 3 (52:36):
So we'll we'll talk about that stuff for sure.
Speaker 1 (52:39):
Well, come back next week, we'll talk all about NESLEI
and I guess until then, I don't know. I hope
I stay away from tornadoes. Don't go if you see
a tornado, go the other way. That's that's the that's
the message for today. That's your that's your ending message.
Speaker 3 (52:52):
All right, we will.
Speaker 1 (52:54):
We'll see you next time.
Speaker 3 (52:55):
Thank you.
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I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com