Tornado Warning Trivia Quiz

Answer: A tornado has been confirmed to have formed.

A "Tornado Warning" means that a tornado has been spotted either in the form of a funnel cloud or on the ground. This could be through actual visual contact or if a tornadic signature is indicated on NWS doppler radar. A "Tornado Watch" means that conditions in the atmosphere are right for tornado activity.

The National Weather Service cannot predict that a tornado is headed for any particular home.

Answer: F-1s

Whenever a hurricane is about to hit Florida (for example, since I live there), a "Tornado Watch" is issued. However, these are usually the weakest kind of tornadoes. They are called F-1's on the Fujita scale. The Fujita scale measured tornado damage and was developed in 1971 by T. Theodore Fujita of the University of Chicago. There have been rare examples of more powerful tornadoes but this is highly unusual.

Answer: "The Suck Zone"

I got this quotation from the below article. "The Suck Zone" was a phrase from a movie but Erik Rasmussen of the NOAA-University of Oklahoma Cooperative Institute for Mesoscale Meteorology Studies in Boulder, Colorado defines the term as such.
http://www.usatoday.com/weather/tornado/wtdow98.html

Answer: Arizona

"Tornado Alley" is considered the area where the more intense tornadoes frequently occur or where tornado frequency is at the highest in a calendar year. I found two main maps that included quite a few states between the both of them, but Arizona was not on either.

Answer: Tornadoes often form in the south west part of thunderstorms

Tornadoes often form in the southwest portion of thunderstorms- next to the part of the storm where heavy rain or hail is falling. This is often the most intensive part of the storm and the part where large dangerous hail falls.

The other three answers are considered myths.

Answer: False

The idea that you should keep your windows open in a tornado is a urban legend of sorts. The thought was that it might equalize pressure. Tornadoes are very unpredictable though and can smash one floor and not the other and studies show that opening or closing the windows does not make a huge difference. In fact, you are creating even another potential vortex area.
http://www.tornadoproject.com/myths/myths.htm

Answer: False

Mobile homes are not safe against tornadoes in any circumstance. A solid building or a storm shelter is preferable.

Answer: True

A waterspout is simply a tornado over a body of water that is funneling water into the sky. They have been known to suck up frogs and fish and drop them over land. If the spout passes onto land it becomes a tornado. If it goes back over the water, it is a waterspout. The noises associated with waterspouts are "hissing" and "sucking".

Answer: May 3, 1999

A supposed "F6" tornado touched down in Oklahoma City in 1999.
Here is a picture of it: http://www.hprcc.unl.edu/nebraska/may3outbreak.html
It produced winds of 318 MPH, which are, to date, the strongest ever recorded shattering the then record of 286 mph in 1991. Its wind left it one mile an hour behind the then inconceivable "F6"

Answer: They often get mistaken for tornado hits

Microbursts are often mistaken for damage caused by F-1 tornadoes. They leave severe damage to homes that they hit head on. Here is some more information and a few pictures: Meteorologists believed that wind speed in a tornado can be above 300 miles per hour but the strongest winds recorded in a tornado were 287 mph. Here is the site where I got this information:
http://hpccsun.unl.edu/nebraska/stuproj/amets00/merriman/facts.html