Can you get tornadoes in the uk

Several cone-shaped funnel clouds — tornadoes that do not touch the ground — have been seen across the UK in the past week. It comes weeks after a tornado is believed to have ripped through east London last month, unleashing widespread damage and triggering flash flooding. Tornado in Darlington bbcweather pic. Footage showed bins being dragged along a residential street by howling gusts and several fences collapsing. The UK sees on average around 35 tornadoes each year — but very rarely are they powerful enough to cause significant damage.

A series of meteorological conditions are needed to create a tornado, including a funnel of cloud that reaches the ground. A large, violent tornado passing through a populated area can lead to total destruction of buildings and property in its path and sometimes loss of life. Such large tornadoes are in the minority of occurrences. Most tornadoes, although they produce damaging winds, do not lead to the widespread devastation often associated with these weather events in the media.

Tornado damage is localised; limited by the track of the tornado. Tornadoes occur in many places around the world, but North America is the continent where they occur most often. In the spring and summer, warm air from the Gulf of Mexico meets cool air from Canada in this region, and this leads to the formation of powerful storms known as supercells that, if the conditions are right, can spawn tornadoes.

Around 30 tornadoes a year are reported in the UK. It carved an 11 kilometre trail of damage in a line bearing northeast that crossed the M25 motorway, the River Thames and the 1,year-old town of Chertsey. After hearing about the tornado on the news, she logged on to the online forum for TORRO , the Tornado and Storm Research Organisation, and offered to write a report on the damage. Her fieldwork began the next day. As a teenager, she lived in the US and remembers the tornado sirens that would send her scrambling for shelter.

Tornadoes in the UK may be smaller, and only about 30 are reported every year , but they can still cause terrible damage and distress. Scientists and volunteers such as Horton seek to document the wreckage left by tornados and other severe storms, a kind of meteorological forensics, so that we can better understand how such events unfold. Detailed surveys, drones, satellite imagery and witness reports all help to build up a vivid picture of what happened.

The data can influence the design of storm-hardy buildings, for example. It can also improve forecasts. Surprisingly, much about tornados, including how they form , still remains a mystery. The UK Met Office says it is not possible to forecast whether tornados will increase in frequency or severity due to climate change in the coming years but it does expect higher winter wind speeds and a greater number of annual winter storms in the latter half of the 21st Century.

In general, the costs of extreme weather are likely to rise meaning that incident reports are going to become all the more important in the future. Three days before Christmas , Horton and her husband drove straight towards the path of destruction left by the Surrey tornado. The closer to the eye of the hurricane the stronger the wind. Once you manage to get inside of the eye of the hurricane there is no wind and everything is still and silent. The eye of the hurricane can take anywhere from 1 hour to a day for the aye to pass over.

Normally when the hurricane hits land the hurricane will slow down and lose strength and will die away. The weather in the UK is very different to the weather that is faced in America. Occasionally we get the odd bad storm here in the UK and very rarely do we see a tornado. We normally just get bad rainfall.

The jet stream is the way the wind travels. The wind travels in currents just like the ocean and has its own paths that it takes.