Tornado

A tornado is a violently rotating column of air that reaches from the base of a thunderstorm all the way down to the ground. It's the most concentrated form of violence the atmosphere produces: winds in the strongest tornadoes exceed 400 km/h, in a funnel sometimes only a few hundred metres wide.

>How one forms

Every tornado starts with a storm — but almost no storms make tornadoes. The recipe (the same one the Tornado Outlook checks) goes like this:

1. A storm fires. Warm, moist air (fuel) gets a push (the spark) and rockets upward.
2. The storm organizes. If the wind changes speed and direction with height (shear), the updraft starts to lean and slowly rotate — the storm becomes a supercell, a storm with an engine.
3. Rotation tightens near the ground. With strong low-level spin and a low cloud base, the broad, lazy rotation gets stretched vertically — and like a figure skater pulling in her arms, it spins faster and faster.
4. Touchdown. The tightening column reaches the ground: a tornado.

Steps 3–4 are the rare part, and the reason a whole day of storms usually passes with zero tornadoes even when the sky looks dramatic.

>How strong?

Tornadoes are rated on the Enhanced Fujita scale — EF0 (weak roof damage) to EF5 (houses swept away) — based on the damage they leave, because nothing survives inside one to measure the wind directly.

>Tornadoes here

Poland and its neighbours see a handful of tornadoes every year, mostly in the summer. Most are weak — but not all: the 2022 Paderborn tornado in Germany was a high-end EF3. The safest place during any tornado warning is the lowest floor, away from windows, in the smallest interior room.