Tornadoes Don't Form Like Meteorologists Thought They Did

Picture a tornado forming. Does the funnel cloud in your mind's eye reach down from the sky like a malicious, spindly finger?

If so, that mental picture may be all wrong. New research suggests that tornadoes form not from the clouds down, but from the ground up.

In a new study presented yesterday (Dec. 13) at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in Washington, D.C., Ohio University meteorologist Jana Houser argued that of four tornadoes observed in enough detail with a rapid radar technique, not a single one started its rotation in the sky. Instead, Houser and her team found, the tornado rotation began rapidly near the ground.

"Tornadoes do not appear to form from the traditional, top-down mechanism," Houser told reporters at a news briefing.

Full Story: https://www.livescience.com/64309-weird-way-tornadoes-form.html?utm _source=ls-newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20181222-ls

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