What Is a Waterspout?

Waterspout is commonly known as dragon absorbing water or dragon hanging water. Waterspout is a tornado that occasionally appears over warm water. Its upper end is connected to a thunderstorm cloud, and its lower end extends directly to the water surface, while rotating and moving. The air-cylinder-shaped waterspout that rotates quickly when saturated with water is no less dangerous than a tornado, and the internal wind speed can exceed 200 kilometers per hour.

Tornado is a severe local weather phenomenon with a very short life history. There is no indication that its occurrence at home and abroad can make a more accurate forecast for it. The United States is the country with the most tornadoes in the world, so research on tornadoes is an absolute leader, but Professor Edwin Kessles, the current director of the National Severe Storm Laboratory, said recently: "We acknowledge that we have no way to mitigate tornadoes The danger is that the best forecasting measure for tornadoes is your own eyes. This is not to say that we are helpless. We still have legs and feet. If you find tornadoes, use them! "Buildings have no feet, I had to witness it turning into ruins in the tornado, which shows that although the tornado is small, it is extremely harmful. The occurrence of tornadoes in our country is less. As the author of this article stated, it is determined by the special terrain of our country. In the article, Dr. Schrock discussed the distribution and formation of tornadoes and the conditions of atmospheric circulation, and provided a clue to detect tornadoes, which has not appeared in various books and literature in China. ^[1]

A waterspout is one that occasionally appears over warm water

Tornado is a small rotating wind, generally not more than 1 km in diameter. Small tornadoes are about 25-100 meters in diameter. Compared with typhoons with a diameter of 1,000 kilometers, it seems insignificant, but its wind is much larger than typhoons. Typhoons Maximum wind speed will not exceed

The most mature of the internal structure groups of waterspouts is the "mother tornado cyclone", which is followed by the tornado cyclone family, tornado cyclone, tornado vortex, tornado funnel, and straw vortex, forming a complete family.

The mother tornado cyclone is composed of multiple tornado cyclones, its range of action is 10-20 kilometers, and its power is the first of the waterspouts; tornado cyclones are composed of various tornado vortexes, the scale of action is 3-10 Kilometers; tornado vortex, also known as small tornado cyclone, is composed of multiple tornado funnels, acting in the range of 1-3 kilometers; tornado funnels are also commonly seen funnel clouds, its scale is about 300 meters, one In the funnel cloud, there are two or even three or more straw vortexes, so it is also called the mother vortex. The straw vortex is the youngest in the waterspout group, and its size generally does not exceed 30 meters, but its destructive force is The largest, sometimes more powerful than a typhoon, mainly because the small pressure gradient of its vortex axis range is particularly large, and the pressure difference can reach more than 20 hundred Pa, which is hundreds or even thousands of times the average pressure difference inside the typhoon. The internal wind speed is extremely high, more than 100 meters per second, which is several times greater than typhoons, and can often cause extremely severe disasters.

Regions with the Most Tornadoes The United States is the region with the most tornadoes in the world, with an annual average of more than 430. From 1980 to 1984, a total of 4,500 tornadoes occurred, an average of 900 times a year. Tornado damage averages $ 100 million per year. A tornado in Texas in 1979 cost $ 800 million and killed 45 people. The United States Gulf Coast, especially on the south of the Florida peninsula, is where sea tornadoes occur most often. During the eight days of August 1968, a total of 27 funnel clouds appeared, and one day there were eight. Many waterspouts appear at the same time or one after the other.

On the night of November 20/21, 1986, in an echo band about 200km wide from southwest of Wales to the English Channel in the east (Figure 1), intense weather occurred with thunderstorms and heavy rain. Around 2330 GMT, Swindon had a land tornado, and at about 0045 GMT, Selsey had a waterspout. These two tornadoes caused damage to a wide range of buildings. These are examples of several mesoscale convective phenomena observed in deeper low-pressure circulations (Figure 2) eastward across England and Wales.