![]() " Tornado Alley," a region that includes the area in the eastern state of South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, northern Texas, and eastern Colorado, is often home to the most powerful and destructive of these storms. These violent storms occur around the world, but the United States is a major hotspot with about a thousand tornadoes every year. Giant, persistent thunderstorms called supercells spawn the most destructive tornadoes. Their winds may top 250 miles an hour and can clear a pathway a mile wide and 50 miles long.Īlso known as twisters, tornadoes are born in thunderstorms and are often accompanied by hail. MORE FROM WEATHER.Tornadoes are vertical funnels of rapidly spinning air. "When you get up close and you see houses being ripped apart and debris falling into the sky and swirling around, you realize… these are pretty powerful forces that we're dealing with."Ĭheck out some of America's most historic tornado photos and drawings on record in the slideshow above. "Even today, it's almost impossible for a photograph or a movie to capture the true terrifying majesty of a tornado," Albert Theberge, the acting head of reference at the NOAA central library told. Because of the tornado's slow progress, Adams had time to set up his camera, Weatherwise reports.Īdvancements in technology have given people greater access to tornado photography, but being at the front lines of an unfolding disaster is extremely dangerous. It shows a less-powerful but well-defined tornado in the rope stage, just as it was dissipating. Adams, who operated a photo gallery in Westphalia, a small railroad town in Kansas, took the photo of the storm from a downtown street corner. ![]() Adams is less well known but is said to be taken a few months earlier, on April 26, 1884. Contemporary records and survivors' recollections indicate the storms were likely an EF3 or EF4 on the Enhanced Fujita scale. The tornado was part of an outbreak that killed at least six people and caused extensive property damage and loss of livestock, according to Weatherwise Magazine. ![]() Two smaller tornadoes extend out from the cloud to either side like devils horns. Robinson's photo shows a massive storm cloud with a thick tornado descending to the ground, just outside of Howard, S.D. The photo was slightly retouched, a common practice in the era, and sold as a postcard, The New York Times reports. While there's mixed accounts of which photo was taken first, the most widely distributed of the two is a photo by F.N. The first two known photographs of twisters emerged in 1884 - one in South Dakota and another in Kansas. In the late 1800s, early photographers relied on cumbersome box cameras, with exposure times ranging from two to ten minutes or more, to capture tornadoes. "In the last couple of years, with the proliferation of cameras, it just became easier to go out after a storm," Mark Fox, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service told the Huffington Post. last month, users uploaded more than 600,000 storm-related videos to YouTube. Following the powerful twisters that swept through El Reno and Moore, Okla. Today social media, smartphones and more affordable technology have inspired a growing number of self-made and amateur storm chasers, the Huffington Post reports. These early photos also paved the way for the legions of storm chasers who would follow. Photographic evidence provided experts with valuable insight and proved fascinating to a public more familiar with legend than science. Very few Americans had actually seen a tornado until the 1880s, when photographers released the earliest known tornado photographs. Historically, the only extreme weather images were from eyewitness sketches. ![]() In 1883, the government had banned the word "tornado" from official forecasts because they were concerned the word would cause widespread panic. In the late 1800s, meteorology was still in its infancy. But for those living in the Great Plains in the 19th century, blows from Mother Nature often came without warning. Watching a livestream of a tornado outbreak has become the norm for many Americans in today's world of Doppler radar and instant communication.
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