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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Chapter 1: What is Tornado Alley?
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 going to talk more about it because probably since we did the last update on Tornado Alley, it seems like it might be changing 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, but the United States in particular, that runs essentially from Texas. Why are you laughing at me? I love to bear witness when you dig yourself into a word hole and climb back out of it bravely.
And 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 than anywhere else in the world. And the reason that is is because it has the perfect conditions for tornadoes to develop.
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, drier air. And then something called wind shear, which is when winds are— changing with height, like the winds are changing and then 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, basically.
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Chapter 2: Why does Tornado Alley have the most tornadoes?
Yeah, so warm, moist air comes up from the Gulf of Mexico, and cooler, drier 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 spawn tornadoes.
And 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 longstanding myth that we probably talked about, about whether there's tornadoes outside of North America.
Chapter 3: What conditions create tornadoes?
And there are, 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. Yeah.
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 plains. 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 happens a lot more lately. There are a lot more trees, dense forest. It's not these big wide open plains. 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. Yes.
And then we should also say that Tornado Alley is a fairly recent term. It was coined in 1952 by a pair of Air Force weathercasters, Major Ernest J. Faubusch. Great name. Agreed. And Captain Robert C. Miller. And I saw that their method of predicting tornadoes was like 95% accurate or something insane like that. Whoa.
So the coin tornado alley, at about the same time, the records of tracking tornadoes begin. Because in the United States, our tornado activity records only date back to the 50s.
Yeah, the 1950s. In fact, it was, I guess, just before we started the podcast in 2007. And I guess I remember talking about this being sort of a new thing at the time, like you said. The enhanced Fujita scale or the EF scale for rating a tornado's intensity or their damage intensity. So that hasn't even been around that long.
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Chapter 4: Are tornadoes only found in Tornado Alley?
But, you know, how it generally worked was if you're going to count tornadoes, you're literally going to do that. You're going to have people calling in to the weather service. You're going to have just regular citizens. You're going to have maybe people in the government or meteorologists weighing in. But people reporting tornadoes to the NWS is how they keep track of how many tornadoes they are.
Yeah. And you just know that the citizens that report tornadoes, there's only 10 of them, but they're probably responsible for like 60 percent of the tornado reports. Yeah, they're into it. I mean, good for them. So you don't just take those 10 people's word for it.
Like you mark where they're saying they saw a tornado and then you send out trained meteorologists to go check afterwards, see what kind of destruction was there. 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 enhanced Fujita 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. And because it only dates back to the 50s and it's still kind of a kludgy 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.
All right. Now I want to go have some tea, so let's take a break. Okay. And we'll be right back.
Okay. Okay.
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Chapter 5: How is Tornado Alley defined?
Hi, I'm Radhi Devlukia, and I am the host of A Really Good Cry podcast. And I had the opportunity to talk to Devi Brown.
Devi Brown is one of the most sought after wellness educators, and through her signature blend of advanced meditation, breathwork, metaphysical physiology, spiritual psychology, and holistic trauma-informed facilitation, Devi has touched the lives of countless students, including renowned artists, athletes, and executives of global corporations.
But anything can be used as a tool of avoidance. With women, any kind of thing where there might be this underlying edge of self-sacrifice as martyrdom, if you're never filling, you're telling yourself a story and you're actually avoiding what you should be doing. Your life at the end of it is still going to be a sum of your experiences. And so you got to get in, you got to get your hands dirty.
Chapter 6: What historical factors influence tornado tracking?
Are there any pictures of you online?
I'm not just talking about Google. I'm talking anywhere. Clearview scrapes together images from Facebook, from LinkedIn, from Venmo accounts.
That database is now being used by police departments all across the country to match criminal suspect photos.
And sometimes it makes mistakes. So in this one case, two of the search results that I think were in the top 10 of the search results were Michael Jordan, a picture of Michael Jordan. But cops are still using it to make arrests. Police, they are trusting the software to lead them to the right suspect.
but you're not even being told that it was used, let alone given any of the details about how it works. This is not Minority Report.
This is happening right now. People are getting arrested and doing actual time in jail after being picked out by a computer. I'm Dexter Thomas, host of Killswitch, where every Wednesday we explain the right now of living in the future. You can turn off the computer, but do not let the computer turn you off.
Listen to Killswitch in the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We should now. OK, Chuck, so like we said, you can have a tornado outside a tornado alley. Sorry, everybody. They just happen there with more frequency. There's also plenty of less powerful tornadoes, too, that happen in tornado alley. But they're also they seem to be also popping up in the southern southeastern U.S.,
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 there's a thought that, there's a school of thought that Tornado Alley is migrating eastward.
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