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tornado sirens normally: 📢⚠️🌪 THERES A TORNADO 📢💥❗️

these tornado sirens: 💫🌸✨ there's a tornado 🥰 🌈🌱

✨😻💖🎶four tornadoes 🎶💖😻✨

Okay we don't get tornadoes in Wales so I am admittedly unsure of the etiquette but if four of the fuckers are going off simultaneously should he not be staying in a house right now

Tornados move fast and are erratic

it's best to get in a storm cellar or the most internal room of your house

So... not wandering around outside making a Tiktok of the pretty sound?

Categories of answers I have received to this question:

1. It's probably just Wednesday
2. It's probably a test (context clues suggest these two answers are related)
3. Yeah but you have to go outside to see the pretty clouds first
4. It's fine, the tornado is probably the other side of the town
5. Mid-westerners have no self-preservation instincts and like to watch the houses fly past

Thank you to everyone who submitted this data for my analysis, my conclusion is that I don't understand America

MURICA YEAH

trans-humanish:

So fun fact, Midwestern USAmericans are seemingly uniquely habituated to tornadoes because their region is literally the most tornadoed place on earth by far.

Another website says that 75% of the Earth's tornadoes are in the United States. I have no idea why this is the case.

Geography.

So basically, what we have that Europe doesn’t is ocean followed by A GIANT-ASS WINDBREAK (the Rocky Mountains). To give you a concept of how big the Rockies are: I live in the Valley of the Sun, aka the Phoenix Metro area. We are surrounded on all four sides by mountains: the White Tanks to the west, the McDowell Range to the northeast, the South Mountains to the, well, south, and the Sierra Estrellas to the southwest. I live thirty miles from the White Tanks. If I go about a mile out of my subdivision, so I actually have a clear range of view not blocked by houses on all sides, I CAN SEE THEM. Faintly, it needs to be a low-pollution day, but they’re still quite large from my view. The atmosphere literally gets in the way before they get too far away to see due to size.

So you’ve got an idea what that looks like, right? You can kind of imagine that in your head?

THE ROCKIES ARE ALMOST FOUR TIMES BIGGER.

And on the far side of the Rockies….it’s just flat land. For thousands of miles.

Behold, Kansas.

(That’s not a joke, by the way. This is a photograph of the Kansan prairie.)

So any windy weather that makes it over the Rockies actually has to be coming down. Like out of the sky. It’s gonna hit the east side of the Rockies like a skier and go zoom. And then once you get into the Midwest, there’s just…nothing to stop that wind from creating some pretty gnarly weather systems. It’s not humid (for the most part) because there are no oceans or huge lakes. There are no giant geological features to get in the way, and no, a city does not count as a giant geological feature. In geologic terms, New York City is a bit noticeable (mostly because it’s a heat sink). Places like St. Louis and Topeka might as well not exist when you’re talking on a scale like that.

Thus: tornadoes. Because there are no mountains to stop them.

Yes! But also: the Great Plains are an uninterrupted flat surface between the Gulf of Mexico and the Arctic.

Tornados form from thunderstorms, which need a combination of warm, moist air and cold, dry air to form. The Gulf provides warm, moist air and the Arctic provides cold, dry air via Canada. So most tornados form in Tornado Alley, which is more or less the southwestern part of the Great Plains. Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas, mainly. But we do get tornados further north, too. Canada has the second most tornados every year, after the US.

But there are other places in the world that have the right open trough connecting warm, moist air to cold, dry air.

Bangladesh holds the record for the deadliest tornados. Both the single deadliest tornado in history (the Daulatpur–Saturia tornado of 1989) and 19 of the 41 tornados to have killed over 100 people. This is largely a result of both population density and Bangladesh's infrastructure being generally less prepared for a tornado than the US's is.

In Bangladesh's case, the cold, dry air comes out of the Himalayas and meets the warm, moist air coming up from the Bay of Bengal.

But the greatest density of tornados--the most tornadoes per square unit of land--is in (sorry, @becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys)...
the United Kingdom.

Most of those tornados are very weak and do minimal if any damage. But there are enough of them on a very small island that it works out to a greater density than tornados in the US.

The UK gets its cold, dry air from the Arctic again, but this time the warm, moist air comes off of the Mediterranean via mainland Europe.

Ah. That explains the bins being up the street sometimes

I did my undergrad at Kansas State. I cannot emphasize how little the words "tornado watch" mean to me. "Tornado warning" might get me to check the weather.

My ex, on the otherhand, was from Boston. And our roommate in the early aughts was from El Paso. So when a Tornado Warning was issued for Humble, they called me, panicked, from our apartment in Meyerland.

Y'all.

Meyerland is in southwest Houston. Humble is northeast Houston. They are 30 miles apart, with a whole city between them. But they were freaked, because Boston doesn't see tornados and El Paso has a climate, not weather.

I tried to patiently explain my utter equinamity about this tornado, but was not able to make an impression.