by everending

Created on: December 19, 2008

When I was young, I thought every cloud in the summer time meant a thunderstorm, and every thunderstorm meant a tornado or some other life-changing natural disaster complete with hail, fire and flying cows. Thankfully, I've learned a lot in twenty-two years.

Yet many myths still exist about tornados, myths that are exploited by a media constantly seeking the sensationalism that bolsters ratings. Not that I'm bitter. But the funny thing about statistics is that they really do lie. The same numbers in different hands can sing a different tune.

General thunderstorms, while capable of hail, wind, lightning, and severe damage (my childhood was plagued by images of my house bursting into a ball of flame as lightning surged through the electrical wiring behind the walls), do not produce the severe tornados seen in Twister. Tornados require specific conditions, conditions that are still, even in this modern era of scientific discovery, theory. What we do know is that the types of thunderstorms that do produce strong tornados, supercells, contain a certain ingredient missing in general thunderstorms. This ingredient? Rotation. Supercells are complicated structures, but the heart of tornado formation is located in an area called the mesocyclone, a rotating mass of downdrafts and updrafts that can spawn a fleet of vortexes. Once again, while the conditions for tornado formation are science, the process itself remains, for the most part, theory. And sometimes, summer thunderstorms are just thunderstorms.

But sometimes, summer thunderstorms are more than just thunderstorms. What are the recent trends in tornado data, and why the media sensationalism? Global warming, the newborn baby of media obsession, has supposed consequences across the meteorological board. Tornados are no exception. As I mentioned before, however, statistics are only as accurate as the honesty of the parties using them. Statistics are only numbers; they only have meaning in their application. And sadly, they are often applied falsely, to support a viewpoint contradictory to the truth of the data.

My childhood self, raised in New Hampshire, may not be happy with my adult self here, but statistically, tornados are more wide-spread than commonly believed. While "tornado alley," the states in the Midwest and the Southwest most often associated with the destructive storms, are plagued with the most annual storms, the rest of the United States is not necessarily safe. Texas averages 139 storms a year, but

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