November 6, 2024 • 11 mins
North America gets as many as 1400 tornadoes a year. The place with the next highest is the UK at 33. So the spot with the most tornadoes in the US is also the spot with the most tornadoes in the world. That would be Tornado Alley.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff. I'm Josh, and
there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, sitting in for Dave,
and this is stuff you should know Short Stuff.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
That's right, we're talking about tornadoes again on the show.
We've talked plenty about tornadoes and Tornado Alley even but
we're gonna talk more about it because probably since we
did the last update on Tornado Alley, it seems like
it might be changing.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
A bit, right, Yeah, definitely for sure, and just even
classifying tornadoes. I'm sure we talked about the changeover because
it would have happened before we talked about it, but
it would have been really new. So yeah, there's a
lot to dig into about Tornado Alley and tornadoes. One
of the first things to understand is that Tornado Alley
is a contested area of the United States of North America,
(00:50):
but the United States in particular that runs essentially from Texas.
Why are you laughing at me? Just runs?
Speaker 2 (00:58):
I love it to bear with this. When you dig
yourself into a word hole then climb back out.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
Of it, well watch this, I'm climbing up. It starts
in Texas, it goes all the way up to the Dakotas,
but it also veers over, it bends and hits like Iowa, Indiana, Ohio.
And this the reason this is considered tornado Alley is
because it has the most tornadoes of anywhere else in
the United States, which means that it has more tornadoes
(01:27):
than anywhere else in the world. And the reason that
is is because it has the perfect conditions for tornadoes
to develop.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
All Right, So tornado producing conditions that you mentioned are
they form through instability in the atmosphere. So a lot
of moist, warm air beneath that cooler, dryer air, and
then something called wind sheer. It's just when winds are
changing with height, like the winds are changing and then
(01:55):
they're changing at different height levels. And if you've got that,
then you've got a pretty good recipe for a tornado.
And it just so happens that those states that you
mentioned have a lot of that kind of weather happening
thanks to where they are.
Speaker 1 (02:09):
Basically, yeah, so warm moist air comes up from the
Gulf of Mexico and cooler, dryer air comes from the west,
like say the Rockies, and they converge in that area
that's Tornado Alley. And when you've got those two factors,
like you said, the wind shear and the instability, supercell
thunderstorms can break out and that's what spawned tornadoes. And
(02:30):
so anywhere you find that where there's instability and wind shear,
a tornado can break out. And they do break out
outside a tornado alley all the time, bad ones, yeah,
for sure. And yeah, it's not even North America. There's
a long standing myth that we probably talked about about
whether there's tornadoes outside of North America, and there are,
(02:52):
but it's just that there's so many more in North America.
You can forgive people for thinking they're just a North
American phenomenon.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
Then yeah, And the other thing too, is in the
areas that you described as tornado alley, at least a
lot of them have these big, wide open planes, and
that's just kind of become the common thing you think
about is a tornado that you see way far off
in the distance coming at you. And that's not always
the case when they happen here in the American South,
which you know, we'll get to the fact that that
(03:21):
happens a lot more lately, there are a lot more trees,
dense forests, it's not these big, wide open planes. So
it's just not what you typically think of as tornado country,
even though they will rip through Georgia or Alabama or
Tennessee just as well as they can anywhere else.
Speaker 1 (03:38):
Yes, and then we should also say that tornado alley
is a fairly recent term. It was coined in nineteen
fifty two by a pair of Air Force weathercasters, Major
Ernest J. Faubush great name agreed, and Captain Robert C. Miller.
And they I saw that their method of predicting tornadoes
was like ninety five percent accurate or something insane likely whoa.
(04:01):
But so the coin tornado alley at about the same
time the records of tracking tornadoes begin, because in the
United States, our records are tornado activity records only date
back to the fifties.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
Yeah, the nineteen fifties. In fact, it was I guess
just before we started the podcast in two thousand and
seven that they and I guess I remember talking about
this being sort of a new thing at the time.
Like you said, the Enhanced Fujiita Scale or the EF
scale for rating a tornadoes intensity or their damage intensity.
(04:35):
So that hasn't even been around that long. But you
know how it generally worked was if you're going to
count tornadoes, you're literally gonna do that. You're gonna have
people calling in to the Weather Service. You're going to
have just regular citizens. You're going to maybe people in
the government or meteorologists weighing in, but people reporting tornadoes
to the NWS is how they keep track of how
(04:58):
many tornadoes they are.
Speaker 1 (04:59):
Yeah, you just know that the citizens that report tornadoes,
there's only ten of them, but they're probably responsible for
like sixty percent of the tornado reports.
Speaker 2 (05:07):
Yeah, they're into it.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
I mean, good for them. So you don't just take
those ten people's word for it. Like you mark where
they're saying they saw a tornado, and then you send
out train meteorologists to go check afterwards, see what kind of.
Speaker 3 (05:19):
Structure was there.
Speaker 1 (05:20):
Exactly put their hand on a railroad track and they
look at the destruction and based on the level of destruction,
they categorize it with that enhance Fujiita scale, and that
ultimately what they're after is classifying it based on presumed
or estimated wind speeds hence the destructiveness of the whole thing,
and then they count it. And that's how they track tornadoes.
(05:43):
And because it's only in only days back to the fifties,
and it's still kind of a cluegye way of tracking tornadoes.
We're not very good at looking at long term trends
in tornado activity. We're not there yet, so we're kind
of reading tea leaves as it were.
Speaker 2 (06:00):
All Right, uh now I want to go have some tea,
So let's take a break. Okay, and we'll be right back.
Speaker 3 (06:05):
Okay, definitely should now dumb now large oils of Ryan.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
Sk Okay, chuck the lake. We said, you can have
a tornado outside of Tornado Alley. Sorry, everybody. They just
happened there with more frequency. There's also plenty of less
powerful tornadoes too that happened in Tornado Alley. But they're
also they seem to be also popping up in the
(06:47):
southern southeastern US with much greater frequency and much more
destructiveness than it seems like there used to be. And
that's actually a point of contention. Not everybody agrees with that,
but they're there's a thought that there's a school of
thought that Tornado Alley's migrating east toward.
Speaker 2 (07:07):
Yeah, they're calling this new new Tornado Alley Dixie Alley.
Some people are calling it that. Other people are saying like, no,
that's not even a thing. And again, these are the
ones that are going maybe through a forest or something,
or in the case of Atlanta, that one year like
in the city of Atlanta, which is very scary and weird.
But there's not really a tornado season like you think
(07:28):
of in traditional tornado alley. They can they can pop
up whenever. I think it's more likely here in the
South to have a tornado in late winter to early spring,
and in the northern plains it's usually summertime. But all
you need and these are what the meteorologists in tornado
people try to hammer home. It's like, yeah, maybe there's
a tornado season, you know, quote unquote season, but like
(07:50):
it's an atmospheric condition and that can happen at any
time in any place really as long as those conditions are.
Speaker 1 (07:57):
Met right exactly. So like you said, so people are
just like, no, that's not actually a thing. It's not
really moving. The reason that a lot of people say
it's moving is because the climate change. It just makes
sense right that as the earth warms, if you need warmer,
humid air underneath colder air to create instability and wind cheer. Well,
(08:19):
then is the earth warms, you're going to have more
warmer humid air, and so yes, if so facto, tornadoes
are going to be breaking out much worse than they
were before, much greater frequency, and probably in places that
you know, you might as well say tornado alleys expanded. Right,
other people are like, not so fast, their buster, because yes,
(08:40):
there probably will be warmer, more warm, humid air, but
because the Earth's warming, that also means there will probably
be less cooler, drier air. Right, So you'll have one
of the ingredients, but you'll have less of the other ingredient,
so you'll have less wind cheer, which means that. But
I don't know, it might be a wash. And at
(09:02):
the very least, we can't really predict at this point
how climate change is going to affect tornadoes. So sit down,
I think, guess what the other scientists are saying.
Speaker 2 (09:11):
Yeah, it's kind of hard to believe after all this
time that this is as far along as we are
with tornadoes, And I don't know, it just seems like
something that you could almost predict it at a certain point.
Speaker 1 (09:24):
Yeah, because we've been tracking them for a while. This
how stuff works article that we're basing this on mentions
what probably the very first report by a European of
a tornado in what would become the United States was
by Governor John Winthrop, one of the Puritans. If you
remember our Puritan episode, Oh yeah, yeah, I'm back in
(09:46):
sixteen forty three. He recorded a powerful wind that whipped
up dust, lifted his meeting house that's probably the big giveaway,
and knock down a tree that fell on some poor
schmo who was killed by it.
Speaker 3 (10:00):
Geez.
Speaker 2 (10:01):
So he said in his logbook tornadoes not so pure
exactly or very pure, depending on how you look at it.
Speaker 1 (10:08):
I guess yeah, now that you mentioned it, you probably
saw them as God's wrath for sure. Do you have
anything else?
Speaker 2 (10:15):
Yeah, we should mention the movie Twisters, because that is
a I guess, I don't know what they call him
these days, but not a remake of the original Twister movie.
But it has long been known that Emily, my wife,
loves the movie Twister, the first one one of her
guilty indulgences, because otherwise she just basically likes independent film
(10:37):
and foreign film and Twister, and that's always sort of
been the joke in the family. But she was very
excited to watch Twisters. We rented it the other night
here at the house. The three of us watched it,
and Twisters gets three big old thumbs down from Oh
that's a shame, just not very good unfortunately.
Speaker 3 (10:55):
Well, it's a.
Speaker 1 (10:56):
Tough act to follow. I mean the first first one
was pretty great.
Speaker 2 (11:00):
Yeah, I mean the cast alone, Philip Seymour Hoffman and
Bill Paxton and Helen Han it was great. Carry ol wise,
really just a top notch movie and holds up. So
I say, don't waste your time with Twisters. Okay, And
I hope no one that made that movie or was
in that movie listens to the show because they're all great. Otherwise,
(11:21):
good for.
Speaker 1 (11:22):
You, man. Chuck was very nice at the end there,
So of course that means short stuff is out.
Speaker 2 (11:31):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff. I'm Josh, and
there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, sitting in for Dave,
and this is stuff you should know Short Stuff.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
That's right, we're talking about tornadoes again on the show.
We've talked plenty about tornadoes and Tornado Alley even but
we're gonna talk more about it because probably since we
did the last update on Tornado Alley, it seems like
it might be changing.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
A bit, right, Yeah, definitely for sure, and just even
classifying tornadoes. I'm sure we talked about the changeover because
it would have happened before we talked about it, but
it would have been really new. So yeah, there's a
lot to dig into about Tornado Alley and tornadoes. One
of the first things to understand is that Tornado Alley
is a contested area of the United States of North America,
(00:50):
but the United States in particular that runs essentially from Texas.
Why are you laughing at me? Just runs?
Speaker 2 (00:58):
I love it to bear with this. When you dig
yourself into a word hole then climb back out.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
Of it, well watch this, I'm climbing up. It starts
in Texas, it goes all the way up to the Dakotas,
but it also veers over, it bends and hits like Iowa, Indiana, Ohio.
And this the reason this is considered tornado Alley is
because it has the most tornadoes of anywhere else in
the United States, which means that it has more tornadoes
(01:27):
than anywhere else in the world. And the reason that
is is because it has the perfect conditions for tornadoes
to develop.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
All Right, So tornado producing conditions that you mentioned are
they form through instability in the atmosphere. So a lot
of moist, warm air beneath that cooler, dryer air, and
then something called wind sheer. It's just when winds are
changing with height, like the winds are changing and then
(01:55):
they're changing at different height levels. And if you've got that,
then you've got a pretty good recipe for a tornado.
And it just so happens that those states that you
mentioned have a lot of that kind of weather happening
thanks to where they are.
Speaker 1 (02:09):
Basically, yeah, so warm moist air comes up from the
Gulf of Mexico and cooler, dryer air comes from the west,
like say the Rockies, and they converge in that area
that's Tornado Alley. And when you've got those two factors,
like you said, the wind shear and the instability, supercell
thunderstorms can break out and that's what spawned tornadoes. And
(02:30):
so anywhere you find that where there's instability and wind shear,
a tornado can break out. And they do break out
outside a tornado alley all the time, bad ones, yeah,
for sure. And yeah, it's not even North America. There's
a long standing myth that we probably talked about about
whether there's tornadoes outside of North America, and there are,
(02:52):
but it's just that there's so many more in North America.
You can forgive people for thinking they're just a North
American phenomenon.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
Then yeah, And the other thing too, is in the
areas that you described as tornado alley, at least a
lot of them have these big, wide open planes, and
that's just kind of become the common thing you think
about is a tornado that you see way far off
in the distance coming at you. And that's not always
the case when they happen here in the American South,
which you know, we'll get to the fact that that
(03:21):
happens a lot more lately, there are a lot more trees,
dense forests, it's not these big, wide open planes. So
it's just not what you typically think of as tornado country,
even though they will rip through Georgia or Alabama or
Tennessee just as well as they can anywhere else.
Speaker 1 (03:38):
Yes, and then we should also say that tornado alley
is a fairly recent term. It was coined in nineteen
fifty two by a pair of Air Force weathercasters, Major
Ernest J. Faubush great name agreed, and Captain Robert C. Miller.
And they I saw that their method of predicting tornadoes
was like ninety five percent accurate or something insane likely whoa.
(04:01):
But so the coin tornado alley at about the same
time the records of tracking tornadoes begin, because in the
United States, our records are tornado activity records only date
back to the fifties.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
Yeah, the nineteen fifties. In fact, it was I guess
just before we started the podcast in two thousand and
seven that they and I guess I remember talking about
this being sort of a new thing at the time.
Like you said, the Enhanced Fujiita Scale or the EF
scale for rating a tornadoes intensity or their damage intensity.
(04:35):
So that hasn't even been around that long. But you
know how it generally worked was if you're going to
count tornadoes, you're literally gonna do that. You're gonna have
people calling in to the Weather Service. You're going to
have just regular citizens. You're going to maybe people in
the government or meteorologists weighing in, but people reporting tornadoes
to the NWS is how they keep track of how
(04:58):
many tornadoes they are.
Speaker 1 (04:59):
Yeah, you just know that the citizens that report tornadoes,
there's only ten of them, but they're probably responsible for
like sixty percent of the tornado reports.
Speaker 2 (05:07):
Yeah, they're into it.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
I mean, good for them. So you don't just take
those ten people's word for it. Like you mark where
they're saying they saw a tornado, and then you send
out train meteorologists to go check afterwards, see what kind of.
Speaker 3 (05:19):
Structure was there.
Speaker 1 (05:20):
Exactly put their hand on a railroad track and they
look at the destruction and based on the level of destruction,
they categorize it with that enhance Fujiita scale, and that
ultimately what they're after is classifying it based on presumed
or estimated wind speeds hence the destructiveness of the whole thing,
and then they count it. And that's how they track tornadoes.
(05:43):
And because it's only in only days back to the fifties,
and it's still kind of a cluegye way of tracking tornadoes.
We're not very good at looking at long term trends
in tornado activity. We're not there yet, so we're kind
of reading tea leaves as it were.
Speaker 2 (06:00):
All Right, uh now I want to go have some tea,
So let's take a break. Okay, and we'll be right back.
Speaker 3 (06:05):
Okay, definitely should now dumb now large oils of Ryan.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
Sk Okay, chuck the lake. We said, you can have
a tornado outside of Tornado Alley. Sorry, everybody. They just
happened there with more frequency. There's also plenty of less
powerful tornadoes too that happened in Tornado Alley. But they're
also they seem to be also popping up in the
(06:47):
southern southeastern US with much greater frequency and much more
destructiveness than it seems like there used to be. And
that's actually a point of contention. Not everybody agrees with that,
but they're there's a thought that there's a school of
thought that Tornado Alley's migrating east toward.
Speaker 2 (07:07):
Yeah, they're calling this new new Tornado Alley Dixie Alley.
Some people are calling it that. Other people are saying like, no,
that's not even a thing. And again, these are the
ones that are going maybe through a forest or something,
or in the case of Atlanta, that one year like
in the city of Atlanta, which is very scary and weird.
But there's not really a tornado season like you think
(07:28):
of in traditional tornado alley. They can they can pop
up whenever. I think it's more likely here in the
South to have a tornado in late winter to early spring,
and in the northern plains it's usually summertime. But all
you need and these are what the meteorologists in tornado
people try to hammer home. It's like, yeah, maybe there's
a tornado season, you know, quote unquote season, but like
(07:50):
it's an atmospheric condition and that can happen at any
time in any place really as long as those conditions are.
Speaker 1 (07:57):
Met right exactly. So like you said, so people are
just like, no, that's not actually a thing. It's not
really moving. The reason that a lot of people say
it's moving is because the climate change. It just makes
sense right that as the earth warms, if you need warmer,
humid air underneath colder air to create instability and wind cheer. Well,
(08:19):
then is the earth warms, you're going to have more
warmer humid air, and so yes, if so facto, tornadoes
are going to be breaking out much worse than they
were before, much greater frequency, and probably in places that
you know, you might as well say tornado alleys expanded. Right,
other people are like, not so fast, their buster, because yes,
(08:40):
there probably will be warmer, more warm, humid air, but
because the Earth's warming, that also means there will probably
be less cooler, drier air. Right, So you'll have one
of the ingredients, but you'll have less of the other ingredient,
so you'll have less wind cheer, which means that. But
I don't know, it might be a wash. And at
(09:02):
the very least, we can't really predict at this point
how climate change is going to affect tornadoes. So sit down,
I think, guess what the other scientists are saying.
Speaker 2 (09:11):
Yeah, it's kind of hard to believe after all this
time that this is as far along as we are
with tornadoes, And I don't know, it just seems like
something that you could almost predict it at a certain point.
Speaker 1 (09:24):
Yeah, because we've been tracking them for a while. This
how stuff works article that we're basing this on mentions
what probably the very first report by a European of
a tornado in what would become the United States was
by Governor John Winthrop, one of the Puritans. If you
remember our Puritan episode, Oh yeah, yeah, I'm back in
(09:46):
sixteen forty three. He recorded a powerful wind that whipped
up dust, lifted his meeting house that's probably the big giveaway,
and knock down a tree that fell on some poor
schmo who was killed by it.
Speaker 3 (10:00):
Geez.
Speaker 2 (10:01):
So he said in his logbook tornadoes not so pure
exactly or very pure, depending on how you look at it.
Speaker 1 (10:08):
I guess yeah, now that you mentioned it, you probably
saw them as God's wrath for sure. Do you have
anything else?
Speaker 2 (10:15):
Yeah, we should mention the movie Twisters, because that is
a I guess, I don't know what they call him
these days, but not a remake of the original Twister movie.
But it has long been known that Emily, my wife,
loves the movie Twister, the first one one of her
guilty indulgences, because otherwise she just basically likes independent film
(10:37):
and foreign film and Twister, and that's always sort of
been the joke in the family. But she was very
excited to watch Twisters. We rented it the other night
here at the house. The three of us watched it,
and Twisters gets three big old thumbs down from Oh
that's a shame, just not very good unfortunately.
Speaker 3 (10:55):
Well, it's a.
Speaker 1 (10:56):
Tough act to follow. I mean the first first one
was pretty great.
Speaker 2 (11:00):
Yeah, I mean the cast alone, Philip Seymour Hoffman and
Bill Paxton and Helen Han it was great. Carry ol wise,
really just a top notch movie and holds up. So
I say, don't waste your time with Twisters. Okay, And
I hope no one that made that movie or was
in that movie listens to the show because they're all great. Otherwise,
(11:21):
good for.
Speaker 1 (11:22):
You, man. Chuck was very nice at the end there,
So of course that means short stuff is out.
Speaker 2 (11:31):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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