Why do you have tornadoes?

Answer 1

The United States has the most most prolific tornado-producing area in the world: Tornado Alley. This regions stretches across the plains in the middle part of the country. Here, warm moist air from the Gulf of Mexico meets cool air from Canada and sometimes warm air from the Rockies. This can produce very powerfult thunderstorms. Shifts in wind speed and direction with altitude, called wind shear, set these storms rotating, turing them into supercells, the primary producers of tornadoes, especially strong tornadoes. Related effects in adjacent regions lead to a high rate of tornado occurence in most of the region between the Appalachians and the Rockies. Such a large region that is prone to tornadoes brings the average number of tornadoes in the U.S. to more than 1,200 per year. In addition to being more frequent, American tornadoes also tend to be the most violent, making them more likely to become major news items.

Answer 2

Oklahoma gets a large number of tornadoes because there are often colliding air masses of different temperatures and/or dew points. These collisions often produce severe thunderstorms. The region that Oklahoma is in, called Tornado Alley, also gets a lot of wind shear. Wind shear occurs when wind at high altitude blows at a different speed and/or direction. This creates horizontal vortices of air that, when turned vertical, give a storm the spin it needs to produce a tornado.

Answer 3

Tornadoes form when warm, moist air collides with cool, dry air, creating instability in the atmosphere. This causes rotating updrafts that can develop into tornadoes under certain conditions. They are most common in regions where these air masses frequently converge, such as in the central United States.

Answer 4

The earth has tornadoes because if the land is flat and cold and hot weather mixes together in the wind it forms a tornado which gets stronger by the second.