So I’ve learned that warm and cold air are one of the essential recipes for tornadoes and hurricanes. However, why does it feel cold if it’s a mixture of both warm and cold?
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The whole deal of “tornadoes are caused by warm and old air colliding” is a gross oversimplification. On hurricanes it’s just wrong.
Hurricanes (more generally called tropical cyclones) are essentially organized, self sustaining collections of thunderstorms, fueled by the moisture that evaporates from warm ocean water. The systems that form at the meeting of warm and old air are mid-latitude cyclones.
Within a hurricane or any thunderstorms for that matter) Warm, moist air rises and cools. This causes moisture within the air to condense and fall as rain. Since this rain is falling from a high altitude where the air is cooler and because it may undergo additional evaporated cooling on its way down it tends to be cooler than the air temperature at the surface. Additionally when you’re skin gets wet your, Your body heat causes water to evaporate which cools you. As a result even when the air is warm rain feels cool.
Tornadoes, which developed during thunderstorms are usually accompanied by rain, and rain-cooled for the rest of the thunderstorm does feed into them. But there is another factor; The pressure inside a tornado is considerably lower than in the areas around it, and gases such as air cool when they are decompressed. This cooling by decompression also causes moisture in the air to condense which, along with lifted dirt and debris, creates the visible funnel of a tornado. If the condensation phone reaches all the way to the ground, Air at the edge of the final must be at the dewpoint or a cooler.
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