Tropical Cyclones and Tornados

The purpose of this paper is to describe, contrast, and compare the tropical cyclone, which can develop into a hurricane, and the tornado. Although the term "cyclone" is used also in popular parlance as a name for a tornado, this usage will be avoided here, since it would obviously be confusing. Cyclones and tornadoes are cyclonic phenomena, in that both consist of a mass of air that is whirling rapidly counterclockwise, but there are vast differences between them. The most important difference between the cyclone and the tornado is that the cyclone is a normal large-scale phenomenon--there are almost always cyclones somewhere within certain latitude belts of the northern hemisphere during many months of the year--but the tornado is a small-scale local phenomenon, and so inherently far more difficult to predict.

Cyclones are whirling masses of air hundreds of miles in diameter. They usually form behind well-established fronts that have become nearly stationary because of a major geographic feature, in the way that eddies will form when flowing water is partially blocked. For example, in winter cold Arctic air sweeps south over the United States, forming a cold front that pushes warmer air ahead of it. Usually the Rocky Mountains serve as a barrier that prevents the warmer air from being pushed to the west; hence, the cold front that separates the Arctic air from the warmer air becomes stationary somewhere along the eastern foothills of the Rockies, often over Colorado a

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the mass of air has become a cyclone. In these latitudes, the prevailing winds flow toward the west; hence, these cyclones move westward, and then northward as they approach the United States. It is these that, when the reach the general vicinity of the Caribbean, most often develop into the hurricanes that devastate the southeastern coast, and then the northeastern if they do not weaken quickly as they move north. Similar cyclones form over the western Pacific in this same latitude band, and resultant hurricanes batter the east coast of Asia. Others form in the Indian Ocean, and flood the low-lying coastal regions of India and its neighboring countries. Still others form west of Mexico, and sometimes northward to dump precipitation over California. Because cyclones and hurricanes are systems that are a few hundred miles in diameter, they are easily spotted and tracked from the air: by plane, starting in the 1930s, now by satellites. Hence, a major storm of this sort cannot now strike the United States unexpectedly. Unfortunately, this is not at all the case for tornadoes, which generally cannot be predicted far enough in advance, if at all, to give people adequate time to prepare for them. Tornadoes are sometimes produced

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