Like, I’ve never heard of a powerful tornado in, say, the UK, Mexico, Japan, or Australia. Most of the textbook tornadoes seem to happen in areas like Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas. By why is this the case? Why do more countries around the world not experience these kinds of storms?
In: Planetary Science
Tornadoes require a very specific layering of air in order to form, especially for large ones.
This is:
Warm and humid air close to the ground.
Warm and dry air above that
Cold and dry air above that
The warm and dry layer stops the humid layer from mixing with the cold layer, preventing them from meeting in a typical front. Instead they’re layered on top of each other with all this energy stored up until something disturbs it enough for the humid and cold layers to interact, resulting in a very rapid release of energy in the form of a tornado.
To get this layering you need three sources of air.
Somewhere warm and humid (eg the Gulf of Mexico, that brings warm and humid air up into the U.S. Midwest.
Somewhere warm and dry. Eg the U.S. southwest, an arid/desert environment that feeds warm and dry air into the same region of the U.S. Midwest.
A mountain range that can kick a layer of air up to cool it down and have it slot in above the two warm layers. Such as the mountains down the western U.S, where prevailing winds constantly send air over them and into the Midwest.
There aren’t many other places with this sort of geography, so rarely get conditions that can form tornadoes, especially big ones.
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