Now that we are well into tornado season in North America, I thought I’d dredge this old post up out of the cobwebs in the dungeon. As Uncle Al pointed out in the comments, Middle Easterners did have dust devils so a vortex of wind was not unknown there. These, however, are no match for a full-blown F4 tornado.

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One has to wonder what the original inhabitants of North America thought of the tornado (how do you say “WTF” in Lakota?). I have visited a few museums in my travels but have never seen any artifacts or heard of any references to Native American perceptions of the tornado phenomenon.  Without a doubt, Native Americans were visited by tornadoes. The experience must have certainly left an impression. It would be interesting to hear any stories that may be out there.  An internet search just offers a Mulligan stew of hits with tired references to Pecos Bill or to the odd disaster in Kansas.

North America is climatically privileged in that there is the possibility that overland southerly flows of cold dry air from the north can readily contact flows of warm moist air from the Pacific, Gulf of Mexico, or the Atlantic.   Vertical mixing of unstable humid air results in convection cells that are further driven by the latent heat of condensation.  These humid flows are spun up by the coriolis effect and wind shear to afford monster anvil storm cells that can tower to 50,000 ft or higher.

Like many places, here in Colorado we often see lines of isolated storm cells in the early evenings of summer, red in color at low altitude changing to a billowy yellow-white at altitude near sunset. Very often you can see mammatocumulous features signifying violent mixing activity. It’s no place for an airplane.

It is interesting to speculate as to how our modern mythologies and iconographies might have been different if the tornado phenomenon had been common in the Mediterranean and the middle east.  Would Charleton Heston have summoned a tornado to smite Yule Brynner’s Egyptians rather than parting the Red Sea and drowning the buggers?  Perhaps the Pharaohs might have built great stone helices rather than oblisks.  Aristotle might have written a treatise on the handedness of helical flows or whether the air flowed radially into or out of a tornado.

If the tornado had been a common phenomenon in the middle east during the iron age would the “Big Three” Abrahamic religions today feature tornadic themes in their texts and monuments? If so, perhaps the great cathedrals of Europe might today have relief sculptures or stained glass windows portraying the Israelites or Philistines being driven hither and thither by the swirling wrath of the Almighty’s cyclone.

Well, that’s enough of that.