Tornadoes — like the one that ripped through parts of the New South Wales Central West yesterday — may be more common in Australia than we realise, experts say.
Yesterday's shock twister around Bathurst injured three people, flattened several homes and uprooted many trees and powerlines.
The Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) said the tornado started around Peel, north of Bathurst, and left a 30-kilometre path of destruction as it travelled south-east to Meadow Flat.
Residents said they heard thunder and saw lightning before a "dark cloud" descended and the tornado blew through.
ABC News: Mollie Gorman
)BOM senior climatologist Agata Imielska said the tornado was part of a severe weather system that had been moving across Australia's east coast this week.
Yesterday, large parts of southern and eastern Australia experienced hail, damaging winds and heavy rainfall.
However, not every weather system causes a tornado — so why this one?
How a tornado starts
A tornado, according to meteorology, is a violently rotating column of air that comes in contact with the ground.
Some are only a few metres wide and others are wider than 1 kilometre. They can last from a few seconds, up to half an hour or longer.
ABC News: Mollie Gorman
)University of Sydney hazard and disaster risk science expert, Dale Dominey-Howes, said tornadoes usually developed under thunderstorms.
"Science isn't sure of the precise mechanism but what we think happens is that warm, moist air travelling across the land surface in one direction [collides] with cold, dry air moving in another direction," he said.
[Click through to share your videos and photos of the wild weather]According to Professor Dominey-Howes, this is precisely what happened yesterday — warm, wet air from the tropical north was dragged down to the cooler air temperatures of New South Wales.
He said the two pockets of air collided, wrapped around each other, and pushed a column into the thunder cloud system creating the funnel shaped tornado.
Tornadoes are more common than we think
When picturing tornadoes, most of us think of "tornado alley" in the United States and Canada, and for good reason.
Professor Dominey-Howes said 80 per cent of tornadoes occurred in that "alley", which takes in states including Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Kansas, Arkansas, Nebraska and some northern parts of Canada.
Even so, he says, that is somewhat misleading.
“Because there are so many people and buildings on the ground in tornado alley, even small tornadoes have the capacity to cause quite a lot of damage, injuries to people and, tragically, even fatalities.”
However, in Australia, a relatively low population density in the locations where tornadoes occur means we are likely to miss them.
ABC News
)"On a lot of our land's surface there's not very many people living … [especially] in the more remote, western areas of New South Wales, where tornadoes occur,” Professor Dominey-Howes said.
"With so few people, we’re likely to miss relatively small tornadoes.
"It’s only larger ones, or ones that impact human settlements, that we have observational records for."
The BOM says tornadoes are more common than people think, with "dozens" of sightings every year but many more go unreported as they occur in remote areas.
There have been more than 40 tornado-related deaths in Australia in the past 100 years, according to Geoscience Australia.
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2021-09-30 19:04:14Z
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