Tornado

Tornadoes are very destructive winds that cause heaps of damage! Here are ten more facts about tornadoes.

• About 1,200 tornadoes are seen every year in the USA.
• The winds at the bottom of a tornado spins faster than the winds at the top.
• Tornadoes have never been spotted in Antarctica.
• Tornadoes form when a downdraft of moist and cool air mixes with an updraft of warm air.
• An average tornado only travels a few miles before it dies out.

Tornado
Image courtesy of Jhallman/ Clker.com (Broken Link)

• The wind speed inside a tornado is about 110 mph/117 km (per hour).
• A tornado’s colour changes, depending where you view it or what the tornado sucks up. This means a tornado could be white, red, blue, brown, grey, orange, yellow and even invisible.
• Tornadoes may not always be visible. If a tornado is visible, the tornado would have low air pressure produced by high wind speeds that mixes the humid air into clouds.
• Tornadoes are most common in Spring and least common in Winter. This is because Spring produces stronger winds while Winter produces the weakest.
• There are many types of tornadoes including waterspouts, dust devils, snow devils, fire wheels and the typical cyclone.

Bibliography:
Schreiber, A 2000, Twister Trouble, Scholastic, USA
Tornado 20 September 2012, Wikipedia, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tornado>