Definition
Though Tornado Alley is considered to be in areas of the Central United States, no official definition of the term has ever been designated by the National Weather Service. According to the National Severe Storms Laboratory FAQ, "Tornado Alley" is a term created by the media as a reference to areas that have higher numbers of tornadoes. Over the years, the boundaries of Tornado Alley have not been clearly defined, but the differences are the result of the different criteria used to define the region. 90% of tornadoes hit this region of the U.S because cold, dry air from Canada and the Rocky Mountains meets warm, moist air from the Gulf of Mexico and hot, dry air from the Sonoran Desert, which causes atmospheric instability, heavy precipitation, and many intense thunderstorms.
The most common definition of Tornado Alley is the location where the strongest tornadoes occur more frequently. The core of Tornado Alley consists of northern Texas (including the Panhandle), Oklahoma and Kansas. However, Tornado Alley can be also be defined as an area reaching from central Texas to the Canadian prairies and from eastern Colorado to western Pennsylvania. It can also be disputed that there are numerous Tornado Alleys. In addition to the Texas/Oklahoma/Kansas core, such areas also include the Upper Midwest, the Ohio Valley, the Tennessee Valley and the lower Mississippi valley.
The term "tornado alley" was first used in 1952 by U.S. Air Force meteorologists Major Ernest J. Fawbush (1915 - 1982) and Captain Robert C. Miller (1920 - 1998) as the title of a research project to study severe weather in parts of Texas and Oklahoma.
Read more about this topic: Tornado Alley
Famous quotes containing the word definition:
“Beauty, like all other qualities presented to human experience, is relative; and the definition of it becomes unmeaning and useless in proportion to its abstractness. To define beauty not in the most abstract, but in the most concrete terms possible, not to find a universal formula for it, but the formula which expresses most adequately this or that special manifestation of it, is the aim of the true student of aesthetics.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)
“... if, as women, we accept a philosophy of history that asserts that women are by definition assimilated into the male universal, that we can understand our past through a male lens—if we are unaware that women even have a history—we live our lives similarly unanchored, drifting in response to a veering wind of myth and bias.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“The man who knows governments most completely is he who troubles himself least about a definition which shall give their essence. Enjoying an intimate acquaintance with all their particularities in turn, he would naturally regard an abstract conception in which these were unified as a thing more misleading than enlightening.”
—William James (1842–1910)