#CityTornadoes #WeatherMysteries #UrbanLegends
Hey there folks! đź‘‹ Have you ever wondered why it seems like tornadoes always seem to skip over big cities? I mean, we’ve all seen the movies where tornadoes wreak havoc on small towns, but major cities seem to be spared. It’s like they have some kind of force field around them, right? 🌪️🏙️
So, why is it that tornadoes seem to give big cities a pass? Do they have a secret agreement with the skyscrapers or something? Let’s dig into this weather mystery together! 🕵️‍♂️💨
I’ve noticed that even in tornado-prone regions like the South and Midwest, major cities like Chicago, Atlanta, and Dallas don’t seem to get hit as often as their smaller neighbors. Could it be the tall buildings disrupting the tornadoes’ path? Or maybe there’s some kind of urban heat island effect at play? 🤔🏗️
But hey, I could just be imagining things. Let’s find out the real deal on tornadoes in cities! Share your thoughts in the comments below and let’s crack this case wide open! 🔍💡
So, have you ever seen a tornado in a major city? What’s your take on this weather phenomenon? Let’s chat and unravel the mystery together! 💬🌪️ #CuriousMinds #WeatherExperts #LetsSolveThis
There are a lot more small towns than major cities. If you randomly throw 20 darts at a board, maybe one or two will hit the bullseye (major city) while the rest would land in the outer spots (small towns).
People talking about size of cities but forgetting one crucial detail
Cities with large buildings act as wind breaks.
Towns with small buildings and large land do not.
People have already correctly answered the question, but it does sonetimes happen. St Louis was hit hard in 1896.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1896_St._Louis%E2%80%93East_St._Louis_tornado
There are a lot more small towns than there are big cities. Throw a dart randomly, you’re gonna miss the bullseye most of the time.
Despite how destructive they are, tornadoes are really small and don’t last very long. They’re less (often *way* less) than a mile wide, run by in a couple of minutes, then they’re gone. For comparison, a hurricane is like 300 miles wide and inches along for days at a time. Now, a violent storm that’s a couple dozen yards wide feels huge if it’s on top of you, but it is very tiny compared to the continental United States. It can honestly be very tiny even compared to a city block. A tornado could reduce your next door neighbor’s house to rubble without your house losing a shingle.
Cities are also very small compared to the continental United States (or a tornado alley state, or even most counties in tornado alley, which is how warnings usually come through). Not as small as tornadoes, but small enough that they don’t necessarily run into each other very often just by sheer statistics. Though it does happen. To my knowledge, a tornado has touched down within Chicago city limits twice in my lifetime. A tornado did damage to a building in Salt Lake City once too. But tornadoes just aren’t big enough to hit any specific location often, or destroy a big city in any spectacular way in the few minutes it’s on the ground (and most tornadoes aren’t the strongest “town leveling” ones anyway. The towns that get totally wrecked are simultaneously very small and very unlucky).
I’ve also heard that the density of large buildings may make it hard for tornadoes to form then stay around in big cities for wind reasons, but that may fully or partially be a myth.
Tornadoes are incredibly violent and destructive… but they are also incredibly localized. The average tornado is about 300 feet in diameter – but you don’t want to be directly NEXT to a tornado either, so we’ll call it 500 feet wide of destructive range. It travels 30 miles per hour for about 10 minutes. That means each tornado has a total impact of about 5 miles by 0.1 miles, or 0.5 square miles.
The state of Kansas gets about 100 tornadoes per year. Kansas has an area of about 80,000 square miles. 50 square miles of it gets hit by tornado per year. That means the odds of any given point getting hit by a tornado in a given year are roughly 0.06%. The largest city in Kansas, Wichita is about 160 square miles, so the odds of some part of it getting hit are roughly 0.2% per year if all other things are equal (and other comments have gone into why they are not).
They don’t hit big cities very often in large part because they don’t hit *anything* very often. It’s just that when they do, they do a ton of damage.
OKC gets hit [fairly regularly](https://www.weather.gov/oun/tornadodata-okc).
Downtown Atlanta was hit pretty hard [in 2008](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Atlanta_tornado_outbreak).
Nashville had a bad one [in 2020](https://www.wunderground.com/cat6/at-least-22-killed-by-overnight-tornadoes-in-middle-tennessee)
But most tornadoes don’t hit major cities because 1) there aren’t many major cities in the areas of the country most prone to tornadoes and 2) major cities are a very small percentage of land area compared to rural areas, which means even if tornadoes were evenly distributed across the country, a majority of them would still miss major cities just based on percentages.
It happens, but a tornado isn’t going to “level a massive city”, they’re not *that* large, but they still will carve a rather destructive path through one.
Better warning has prevented loss of life.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tornadoes_striking_downtown_areas_of_large_cities
The heat Island effect caused by roads, parking lots, and large buildings somewhat protects cities from tornadoes and similar storm types. They can still hit them, but the pressure differences between the city air temp and the surrounding area air temps typically deflect them.