In the second edition of "Josh's Weather Academy," we look at how a tornado develops.
In order for a tornado to develop, there needs to be a thunderstorm. In a thunderstorm, there are both rising and falling columns of air. In a nutshell, tornadoes develop when wind variations with height support rotating air in the part of the thunderstorm cloud where the air is rising. This is known as the updraft. The interaction of the rising and falling columns of air produces spinning currents inside the cloud. Typically these currents spin horizontally but if conditions are just right sometimes those horizontal currents become vertical and drop down from the cloud, when that happens a funnel cloud is produced by the thunderstorm, if the funnel touches the ground it becomes a tornado.
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