Are there people who live in the heart “Tornado Alley” northern Texas (including the Panhandle), Oklahoma and Kansas that have never seen a tornado within say five miles of where they live?
If you had a map of Kansas and Oklahoma and blackened in all the tracks of tornadoes over the last 100 years, how black would the map be?
We had them quite often in Texas. And the one that actually hit our town, while much smaller than this one in Oklahoma, still killed 20 people. I’m amazed the death toll from this week’s is not higher.
Also, just from 1950 to today, we are talking about 20,000 tornadoes in top 10 states that receive tornadoes.
If you went back 100 years, that would seem to imply about 40,000 or more tornadoes in the top 10 tornado receiving states.
In other words, map’s gonna be pretty black.
Growing up, I used to watch them nearly every summer. Our house was on a rise that overlooked the eastern plains of Colorado. On a clear day, you could see nearly to Kansas. A few times I recall seeing 2-3 tornadoes active at the same time.
Denver International Airport is now setting in the area where we used to see them. Eventually they reworked the bathrooms to serve as tornado shelters, but I was pretty skeptical when they first opened it at that location.
Here’sa cool little statthat says Kansas averages 11.7 tornadoes per 10,000 square miles each year. Since that’s equal to 400 blocks of five miles on a side, that means statistically any given five mile area will have a chance of .029 tornadoes in a given year or one tornado in about 34 years.
In the last 18 months or so I’ve had two EF0-1 tornadoes touch down within three miles of my house. I don’t even count that as having been “in” a tornado because all I got was a little hail. I’ve been within 1,000 feet of three tornadoes (including an F3 and F4) and I’ve never lived in the classic tornado alley.
This is a link to a map I posted in another thread, but as you can see “Tornado Alley” is much of the eastern half of the country over 50 years.
ETA: Tastes of Chocolate’s Gizmodo map is way cooler!
Those maps are cool but I think that they make it look like the tornados cover more area than they really do. Tornados are really pretty thin usually the danger area is a few hundred to a thousand feet wide. It is only a very rare one that does major damage in a path a few miles wide. The lines on the maps are much thicker than that. Especially the map linked by Tastes of Chocolate where the tracks look to be around 10 to 25 miles wide.
I’ve lived in the Dallas area for 14 years now, and it’s a rare year when there’s not some tornado activity somewhere in the area. Probably 9 times out of 10, it’s an EF-1 tornado in a farm field somewhere, but they do occasionally hit populated areas- witness the Cleburne and Granbury tornadoes of last week, and the Ft. Worth ones 10 years ago.
In my 50+ years of living in Kansas I’ve been under more tornado watches and warnings than I could even try to count. But the number of tornados that have actually hit somewhere in a town I was in at the time? You could count that on the fingers of one foot. The closest one has ever come to me was about 6 miles away, and that was nearly 20 years ago. The next closest hit a town about 10 miles away 3 or 4 years ago. I’ve never been close enough to one to actually see it.
I live in the way north end of the tornado range, Minnesota.
In an average year, we probably have a 15 tornado watches, and 5 tornado warnings.
In the about 25 summers that I can remember, I can remember 3 tornados that came within 5 miles of where I was at the time. The actual number is probably double that. So rough guess is one summer in 4 there is a tornado spotted within 5 miles.
For more tornado maps, check out www.tornadohistoryproject.com. You can build your own map, limiting tornado intensity, or year, or month, or location.
Never seen one in N. Georgia, but I know one came within a few miles of me. I don’t think I know anyone who has actually seen a funnel in person.
We sailed ahead of a waterspout in the Virgin Islands once. That was very cool.
I lived in western Ohio up until 1998 and never saw any tornadoes until the movie Twister came out and we all started chasing them. Saw three of them after that, last time I ended up right in front of one. My friend pointed to a peaceful looking white cloud that was being drawn into a sinister looking black cloud and before we new knew it the funnel formation became evident, the sky went pitch black and lightening started striking all around; then we jumped in the car and drove thru a barrage of hail; barely made it around to the side of it. Gawd was that a stupid pastime. :smack:
Is the US the only country that deals with such a high level of tornado activity?
The vast majority of all tornadoes on Earth are in fact located in the United States. It has a lot to do with the vast flatness of the middle portion of North America, and how the air currents happen to be right for it. They do happen elsewhere around the planet, but not nearly as often as Tornado Alley.
The Master speaks.
It depends on what you mean. Tornado Alley is pretty unique, but if you average everything out, I think the UK actually has more tornadoes per square mile. (The US has a lot of places where tornadoes don’t happen much at all to balance out Tornado Alley.)
Same here… I lived in NE Kansas the first 40 years of my life and never actually saw one with my own eyes… until I went back to visit. I had been living in Texas for a few years but returned to see family on May 21, 2011 (the day before an EF5 hit Joplin, MO). Travelling north on I-35 I noticed the sky ahead of me taking on that weird orange/green/brown twilight look, so I turned on the radio, heard the tornado warnings, and pulled off in Emporia for safe harbor. As soon as I crested the offramp leaving the highway I was staring directly at a tornado (which was probably a mile away, but seemed much nearer in the surprise of the moment). I got right back on the interstate and sped south to a rest area 30 miles closer to Texas to wait it out.
I’ve moved around for most of my life, but spent maybe 10 years of it living around Tornado Alley (varying places ranging from Central Texas up to Kansas), off-and-on. I recall one storm that we thought was a tornado at first but which later turned out to simply be a very destructive thunderstorm (caused quite a bit of damage to a couple of neighborhoods and destroyed our neighbor’s car shed without damaging their daughter’s car inside), and had one or two tornadoes touch down while I was stationed in Kansas (neither of them was on the same side of Wichita as my base was).
The second one that touched down while I was in Wichita was the time I learned that my apartment complex had no tornado shelters, and that the nearest shelter happened to be on base where I worked (we ended up driving on base and using the storm shelter which also doubled as one of my two offices).
So no, I’ve never seen a tornado. The two times where one was close enough that I might get to see it, I was taking shelter like I was supposed to. Well, the second one I was. The first one I was on the balcony trying to see it, and meeting my future wife (the tornado ended up touching down nowhere near where we thought it would, so we were looking the wrong way)
FWIW, tornados were in 48 states last year (guess which two weren’t included). My family has lived in the heart of Tornado Alley for a century and I am aware of only one instance when a relative’s home actually sustained damage from the wind … and that occurred more than 50 years ago. (Hail is another matter, of course, as that causes very frequent and widespread property damage. In fact, the insurance companies readily acknowledge the greater property damage in Tornado Alley comes from hail, not wind. The other thing that insurance companies will tell you is that they are no longer sure precisely what constitutes Tornado Alley.)
I was in OKC for the recent EF5 as well as the one that hit in May of 1999, when the highest wind speeds ever recorded on earth were part of the experience. If you’re talking about the OKC area in particular, it is a sprawling area of more than 600 square miles. Include the whole metro area and it is ten times that size. I have friends who live within a few houses of the destruction area and they had nothing worse than a power outage and debris from others’ homes to clean up in their yards. Tornados are peculiar things and frequently occur, and you don’t want to mess around with 'em in the immediate area, but unless they are drawing a path right on top of you, you wouldn’t necessarily get any direct damage, especially with a smaller storm. And most folks have a shelter in their home or access to one nearby, including in many public buildigs, which is why you can see such great destruction over a 17 mile path but fewer than 30 deaths. Decent warnings are pretty handy things when you live in Tornado Alley!
