Over 2,000 times a year, all over the world, a meteorological phenomenon strikes the earth with devastating consequences.

They can strike without warning, and the worst ones have killed hundreds of people.

Yet the secret to how they work wasn't understood until one determined man figured it out.

Learn more about tornadoes, how they work and just how deadly they can be,

on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. I have to confess the inspiration for this episode came from a tornado warning which my area just went through a few hours

before recording this episode. As I already had this topic on my list of

future shows I figure there was no time like the present to address the topic of

tornadoes.

Tornadoes are one of the most devastating and destructive forces in nature.

So let's start at the beginning to address what a tornado is.

A tornado, as most of you probably know, is a vertical vortex of rapidly spinning air.

But why does such a vortex start, and why doesn't happen all the time?

Full-blown tornadoes only occur when you have storms and the reason for

this has to do with the movement of air. On a normal day atmospheric pressure is

usually pretty stable. Regardless of what the temperature is, air pressure is pretty much going to be the same over a given area.

There are some exceptions to this, which I will get to in a bit.

However, when you have a storm, you have large differences in air pressure.

In particular, there are certain types of storms that you have large differences in air pressure.

In particular, there are certain types of storms

that tend to cause tornadoes called supercells.

This starts with winds blowing at different speeds

and directions at different elevations. The boundary between these winds is known as wind shear.

...