It has been brought to my attention that I know very little about tornadoes. There are only two things that I know about them, in fact. They are a corkscrew of wind, and they helped Dorothy get to Oz. But do they start from the bottom or from the top? Can they travel over a mountain? What about a mountain that’s more like a cliff? That is, could a tornado go up the Dawn Wall? And aren’t they one of the few natural disasters that California doesn’t have?
Well, I have learned the answer to the last question: no. (Or, I think it’s no. There are too many negatives in that question.) What I mean to say is, we had a tornado warning last week, and I realized I had absolutely no idea what to do about it.
So I set out to learn more about tornadoes. And I found that there are actually plenty of tornadoes in California. Between 1950 and 2012, there were nearly 400 of them spotted. Most of them seem to hover around the Central Valley, but there have been plenty in the Los Angeles area, too. One of the biggest ones happened in Orange County in 1978, injuring six people and causing a more than half-million dollars in damage.
As far as mountains go, tornadoes at high elevation are rare, but they do happen. The highest elevation tornado in the country happened in 2004 in Sequoia National Park. With the help of photographs that a hiker took of the twister (yikes!), researchers estimated that it touched down just above 12,000 feet.
Did I just say ‘touched down’? That might not be right. Researchers used to think that supercell thunderstorms drove tornadoes from the top, by rolling up high-speed winds and sending the funnel downward. But a presentation at the American Geophysical Union meeting in December 2018 suggested that tornadoes actually are born much closer to the ground and move upward.
It turned out that I didn’t have to do anything about the tornado last week. The weather service cancelled the warning, and we went about our business. But a tornado did find its way to nearby Ventura Harbor, where it rustled up kayaks, trees and roof tiles. Now I’ve read the tornado literature to learn what I should do if a tornado actually finds us here. I’ll pull all the blankets and quilts out off the hall closet and pile them on top of us in the hallway, away from all the windows. (Can I still watch Fleabag under there?)
As for the Dawn Wall, it’s considered one of the hardest (if not the hardest) climbs in the world. Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson were the first to free climb it in 2015, then Adam Ondra climbed it in 2016. Tornadoes, I know what you’re thinking. You don’t get the respect that your cousins the hurricanes do. Most of you don’t even have names. We can remember Katrina and Sandy and Maria. At least, we should. But if one of you climbs the Dawn Wall, I promise, no one will ever forget it.
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Image by Niccolò Ubalducci via Flickr/Creative Commons license 1/2/19