I live in Nashville, and we just had a very devastating EF-3 Tornado over night that caused massive damage and lose of life, especially in the East Nashville, or Five Points area.
https://www.tennessean.com/story/weather/2020/03/03/nashville-tornado-path-map-shows-familiar-east-west-direction/4937370002/
This article came up where 2 previous tornado’s (1933 and 1998) had pathed into the same focal point, and I was wondering what about this area makes it perfect for tornado pathing?
In: Physics
Tornadoes reach thousands of feet high. Nothing on the ground really “attracts” them to follow a path. Things like hills and mountains and other large disruptive landscape features can certainly interrupt a rising, spinning column of air, especially if it formed at a lower elevation. And that in turn might mean that a certain topography – a certain landscape – might be more favorable for tornado formation, which in turn might sort of mean that some areas might see more of them, but that’s not the same thing as the question.
Tornadoes generally move from west to east because that is the way fronts/storms usually move. And depending on what time of year it is, the general direction of storms will be more specific in a particular spot, like for example maybe most summer thunderstorms in the upper Midwest are forming along cold fronts sweeping from west-southwest to East-northeast. Given that some of those storms might spawn tornadoes, it’s likely that many paths will have roughly parallel or even similar paths.
It is odd that two of those historical paths have a lot of overlap, but that is how randomness works sometimes. It’s not necessarily a sign that the path there is actually attracting tornadoes or more favorable to them.
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