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
The “heat islands protect urban centers” idea is complete b.s. The reason tornadoes rarely hit urban centers is the one that u/most-likely-a-bot said: they just take up a relatively small percentage of land.
Statistically, in Tornado Alley, a tornado hits the same square mile every 700 years.
As for why there’s a Tornado Alley in the USA in the first place–that is, a large geographical area where tornadoes are more frequent than other large geographical areas–that’s because you have cold and dry air masses coming in from the West and North, which have lost their moisture due to the Rockies, coming into contact with warm, moist air masses from the Gulf of Mexico.
If it weren’t for Gulf moisture we wouldn’t have the breadbasket of the world in the U.S. midwest. We need the Gulf moisture, but it is the main culprit in U.S. tornadoes.
The U.S. South has a fall tornado season in addition to a spring tornado season. That’s because you can get more interaction between warm, moist air masses and cold, dry air masses in the U.S. South in the fall than you can in other parts of the USA.
The USA has more tornadoes than any other continent because we have the wide open space where Gulf moisture can interact with dry, cold air from the Rockies.
As to why St. Louis and Nashville have been hit more than once, that’s a statistical fluke. However, as populated areas grow and take up more geographical area, people come into contact with tornadoes more often. Also, modern radar lets us know about more tornadoes than we probably did before, because many tornadoes in the past may have touched down in unpopulated areas with no radar to tell us about them.
Here are some major urban areas that have had tornadoes: Fort Worth, Brooklyn, Atlanta (Google Georgia Dome tornado) (A basketball game went into overtime saving countless lives, because otherwise the people in the Georgia Dome would have been in their cars) Fort Worth, Salt Lake City, Nashville at least twice, Dallas at least twice, St. Louis at least three times, and Chicago almost got it in 2013 (Soldier Field was evacuated as a game was going on when a tornado almost touched down) Many of these can be seen on Youtube. The Brooklyn one was a baby one and pretty much only busted out store windows. I think it was an F0.
Edited to add: As to why several tornadoes have hit in the same exact place, that’s a statistical fluke. The 2013 Oklahoma City tornado took almost the same path as the Moore tornado of 1999, but there have been plenty of other Oklahoma City-area tornadoes. (It’s one of the areas with the most frequent tornadoes, although Florida wins the prize. Florida tornadoes are often baby ones, though) In KC, the 2003 tornado took almost the same exact path as a 2019 tornado. Those are just statistical flukes. Tornadoes don’t care what geographical features are on the ground, except for mountain ranges which cause moisture to be wrung out of air masses. A tornado doesn’t care if there’s a skyscraper or a trailer park or an open field below it. Again, the reason they seem to hit rural areas more often is there are a lot more rural areas than urban ones. And the reason they seem to hit trailer parks harder is that baby tornadoes will destroy a trailer but won’t destroy a house.
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