Welcome to Aria and Alan's open class!
This is lesson 2: Tornadoes.
Hi my audience,
I am a scientist who studies tornadoes. Tornadoes are fast rotating air columns which are usually born from thunderstorms. If you search for Tornado Alley online you can see it’s a broad area in the Midwest, where hot air from the Gulf of Mexico meets cold air from Canada. Tornadoes can be big or small, and a very strong thunderstorm can even cause twin tornadoes.
Hurricanes from the tropical ocean can bring tornadoes too. Hurricanes are bigger and last longer than tornadoes.
Tornadoes can last from seconds to an hour. The impact of tornadoes are described with eF-scale numbers. The strongest tornadoes are EF5 tornadoes, and they can wipe off towns. EF4 and EF5 tornadoes strike the US every year.
Tornadoes can cause a lot of trouble like blowing your house down. If you hear a tornado warning or see it, stop whatever you're doing, go to your basement or a lower-level room without windows.
They are very dangerous, but sometimes funny. It was reported that a tornado carried away a baby and dropped him off hundreds of feet away from home without even waking him up.
Tornadoes are hard to predict, but we are working hard to make forecasts using radars and satellites. Thank you for watching. We will meet you again in our next video!