Do tornadoes occur OUTSIDE of the United States?
I’ve never seen CNN report a tornado occurring in Europe, Africa, Australia, etc.
We get them in the UK, as this BBC news item shows.
I was puzzled about this too. The recent disaster in Myanmar was called a cyclone. I thought they were synonymous.
Yes. Here’s a site with information about tornados. If you click on All Tornadoes and then Worldwide tornado pages you get to an interactive world map. Many of its links are “under construction”, but it does, for example, provide a list of tornados in China.
I think “tornado” refers just to the hose-formed twisters. Cyclones cover a larger area.
AFAIK, “cyclone” is synonymous to “orcane” and “hurricane,” but not to “tornado.”
“Cyclone” can be colloquially used to refer to a tornado, although the technical usage (and the usage I’m more familiar with) refers to a large-scale, rotating wind-and-pressure system of which hurricanes and typhoons are types of.
There are lots of tornadoes outside of North America. England has plenty for example as does Australia. However, tornados above F-1 (Out Of F-5) are very rare outside of the U.S. That means that the pee your pants and kiss your family goodbye tornadoes at F-3 and above don’t happen much in other countries so the smaller ones don’t cause much damage and aren’t that newsworthy.
Cecil has written on the subject.
Tornado’s are the objects you see that extend down from clouds, Cyclones are the larger storms usually formed over water and are referred to differently by region:
[ul]“hurricane” (the North Atlantic Ocean, the Northeast Pacific Ocean east of the dateline, or the South Pacific Ocean east of 160E) [/ul]
[ul]“typhoon” (the Northwest Pacific Ocean west of the dateline) [/ul]
[ul]“severe tropical cyclone” (the Southwest Pacific Ocean west of 160E or Southeast Indian Ocean east of 90E) [/ul]
[ul]“severe cyclonic storm” (the North Indian Ocean) [/ul]
[ul]“tropical cyclone” (the Southwest Indian Ocean)[/ul]
Left out the Link to the above list.
A “cyclone” is simply a big and deep low-pressure system. (Compare “anticyclone”, an area of high-pressure.) The cyclone in Myanmar was similar to what is called a hurricane in the USA.
Hurricanes and tornadoes are totally unrelated, of course. Tornadoes are associated with convective storms, rather than large-scale circulation – and yes they do occur outside the USA. I have observed two small ones myself, in Cambodia and in the UK (the UK one was probably technically a “funnel cloud” as I don’t think it touched down).
In fact it is said that the UK gets more tornadoes per square mile than the USA does! But remember - (a) that is per square mile of the whole country, not per square mile of “Tornado Alley” in the USA; (b) the UK doesn’t tend to get very big twisters, although they can be big enough to cause significant damage. In recent years, Birmingham (see Rayne Man’s link) and London have both suffered structural damage.
Huh! I thought a cyclone was a tornado that turned the other way.
I may have just possibly misinformed some people. And with out even the slightest shred of doubt in my voice.
Don’t feel too guilty about it. My mother and her family, who grew up in Midwestern farm country and went through their share of tornadoes, always called them “cyclones.”
Heck, they occur on Mars. They’re informally called “dust devils.” 
There was one in Perth, WA a couple of days ago.
There was a bad “windstorm” in Versailles, France in 1999. It took 10,000 trees down.
Nitpick. Tornadoes come down from the sky, dust devils go up from the ground, and they are not equivalents or even really opposites, though they may look superficially similar.
Perth, Washington is certainly within the U.S. as is the rest of the state. Oops, you are talking about Western Australia. Can you change that abbreviation please? It gets confusing and a number of us have been tricked by it.
I wasn’t. But I was going to make a smart-alecky post too. 
But when I looked up the ZIP code for Perth, Washington it wasn’t found. Couldn’t find it on MapQuest either. I thought I heard of a town in Washington called Perth, but I can’t find it.