Tornadoes don’t hop, jump or skip. They can retreat back up into the clouds and spawn again sometime later. They can carve a path through a neighborhood that spares some houses and demolishes others. This leaves the impression the tornado skipped houses. While it’s true a tornado can completely destroy one house and minimally damage another right next to it, the reason has nothing to do with jumping or skipping. It does have to do with the internal structure of the tornado and its path. The funnel of a tornado…
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With today’s land starved metropolitan cities expanding further into their rural surroundings, a strange consequence had been documented: cities create thunderstorms, or at least assist in their genesis. It’s called the “urban heat island effect” and is based upon a simple concept. As a city increases in size, the amount of heat absorbed in the area from the sun also increases. Vegetation and trees, which cool the air through shade and evaporation are being replaced with tar roof tops, dark colored roads, and asphalt parking lots which absorb more energy….
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Those big thunderstorms that produce tornadoes, powerful downdrafts and torrential rains are almost always accompanied by hail. Some of these storms can drop so much hail, it looks as if it’s snowed in the middle of summer. Others can drop hail the size of softballs, large enough to kill livestock and even unsuspecting people caught outdoors. These storms cause billions of dollar in damage to crops and property each year. For example, one storm that ravaged the Denver Metro area on May 8th, 2017 caused $1.4 billion in damages with…
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Hurricanes are the most powerful storms on Earth in terms of size, energy released, and the scale of damage they can produced. The wind and the rain can be unrelenting, but the storm surge often times causes more damage. And if that’s not bad enough, hurricanes can even spawn tornadoes which makes some locations sustain far greater damage than the surrounding areas. The terms typhoon and hurricane mean the same thing, that is, they are both non-frontal synoptic scale low-pressure systems over tropical or sub-tropical waters with organized convection (i.e.;…
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Even though the Earth does pass closer to the sun during part of its orbit, this is not what’s responsible for the hot summers and cold winters. If this were the case, then both the northern and southern hemispheres would have their summers and winters at the same time. However as you’ll see below, exactly the opposite is true. When it’s summer in the northern hemisphere, it’s winter in the southern hemisphere. The Earth rotates about its axis once per day, but the Earth’s axis is tilted, 23.5° from vertical…
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