Storm Chasing In England Ask Dave a weather question

Dave Thurlow, Host

 
Hi, I'm Dave Thurlow from the Mount Washington Observatory and this is The Weather Notebook. You don't usually think of the pastoral English landscape being beset by tornadoes, but Robin White tells us a British weather organization says England gets more tornadoes than you'd think:

RW: "TORRO, the English tornado and storm research organization, claims the UK has more reported tornadoes per unit area than anywhere else in the world, including the US. Derek Elsom, who started Torro in 1974, estimates that England gets, on average, 33 tornadoes a year. The first tornado recorded in English Literature was in 1091 in London:

DE: 'Its force can be suggested by what happened to one of the churches, a church called Mary Le Beau in London. The rafters were about 26 foot long and they were thrust into the heavy clay London soil, leaving only about four feet of the huge wooden strut being exposed. And the force to do that would be pretty dramatic.'

RW: Elsom says that was as bad as the worst US tornadoes. But most English tornadoes are quite small. That's led the British Meteorological Office to undercount the number and to under-allocate resources. There's only one Doppler radar in the country, for example and that only picked up its first tornado in 1998.

English storm watchers face other barriers if they want to follow tornadoes in the field. DE: 'If you drive along our road networks you'll find very few straight roads, a very complicated road network RW: Still, TORRO is developing a network of UK stormwatchers to help change the British conception that tornadoes are a freak event. And Torro's website is currently offering a chance for English tornado chasers to visit the US to in some real practice."

And you can visit the TORRO website through our website, which is mountwashington.org Thanks to Robin White, an independent producer from San Francisco, Ca. Our show is funded by Subaru and the National Science Foundation.