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#Repost///@dr.jonnywilliammalloy: How do tornadoes form?Perhaps justifiably the most intense and concentrated severe weather phenomenon you can experience on the planet is the tornado. As a way to a measure and communicate a tornado’s destructive power, the Enhanced Fujita Scale (or “EF Scale” for short) is used by the National Weather Service to categorize tornadoes based on both estimated winds and potential destructive power. The rating system has six ranges for estimated wind speeds: EF0 (65-85 mph), EF1 (86-110), EF2 (111-135), EF3 (136-165), EF4 (166-200), and EF5 (over 200 mph). The use of “estimated winds” is deliberate as it’s unlikely you would be able to verify in real-time winds associated by a passing tornado without a direct hit on an established weather station (and only if such a reporting station didn’t incur damage in the process!). This is why visual sightings conveyed by storm chasers and the utilization of Doppler radar to estimate winds (even over remote areas) allow operational meteorologists on duty to discover, track, and warn the public of tornadoes in the region.Under close scrutiny by the modern scientific community for decades now, the tornado, or more specifically how they precisely develop in the first place, remain debatable and, therefore, continues to be an active area of research. In this discussion, I wanted to highlight a few leading theories.One theory is that thunderstorms supportive of tornadoes have overlapping scales of circulation. First, it is possible to have an entire thunderstorm take on a broad area of rotation. You likely have heard the term “supercell” thunderstorm before. These rotating thunderstorms are generally borne from an environment that have significant vertical wind shear (changing wind speed and direction with height) and an available low-altitude warm and moist air mass able to fuel cumulonimbus cloud formation. These two basic severe thunderstorm ingredients often combine over the Midwest states, making bouts of supercell thunderstorms relatively frequent, hence why this region of the world is appropriately dubbed “Tornado Alley”...Discussion continued at: patreon.com/drjonnywilliammalloy