Why is it that it seems like tornados never hit major cities (even in south and Midwest) seems like it’s always small towns. Even if they do spawn in major cities they seem to avoid any major areas. I Don’t seem to hear of massive cities getting leveled by tornados. (Atleast in my area)
In: Planetary Science
Tornadoes are incredibly violent and destructive… but they are also incredibly localized. The average tornado is about 300 feet in diameter – but you don’t want to be directly NEXT to a tornado either, so we’ll call it 500 feet wide of destructive range. It travels 30 miles per hour for about 10 minutes. That means each tornado has a total impact of about 5 miles by 0.1 miles, or 0.5 square miles.
The state of Kansas gets about 100 tornadoes per year. Kansas has an area of about 80,000 square miles. 50 square miles of it gets hit by tornado per year. That means the odds of any given point getting hit by a tornado in a given year are roughly 0.06%. The largest city in Kansas, Wichita is about 160 square miles, so the odds of some part of it getting hit are roughly 0.2% per year if all other things are equal (and other comments have gone into why they are not).
They don’t hit big cities very often in large part because they don’t hit *anything* very often. It’s just that when they do, they do a ton of damage.
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