Tornadoes don’t really hop, jump or skip. They can pull back up into the clouds and come back down sometime later, but this usually occurs over a fairly large distance. On a smaller scale, people tend to believe tornadoes can hop or jump over one house while totally destroying the one next to it. While this is true that a tornado can completely destroy one house and minimally damage another right next to it, the real reason has nothing to do with a tornado jumping or skipping. It has to do with the internal structure and varying intensity of a tornado.
The funnel of a tornado is sometimes composed of two or more vortexes which are just like smaller tornadoes that spin around in a circle (as seen in the picture to the left). This kind of tornado is called a multiple-vortex tornado and is almost always responsible for narrow paths of extreme destruction. We normally can’t see the individual vortexes because condensation and debris obscure the internal structure and give a tornado that wedge shape appearance.
