In 1925, the Tri-State Tornado Outbreak (happened in Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana) killed 689 people. In 1936, tornadoes killed 419 people in Mississippi and Florida. In 1965, 48 tornadoes occurring within 12 hours killed 256 people. In 1974, 148 tornadoes killed 315 people and injured 5,300 more in 11 States. Unquestionably, tornadoes are dangerous. They wreak havoc and cause millions of dollars of damages. And they leave the lives along their paths destroyed and desolate.

Unfortunately, very little useful information is learned about tornadoes. That is, there are so many facts about tornadoes but that crucial knowledge of how to predict or stop tornadoes is still missing. What people are left with are theories and approximates. And much information about tornadoes are either unproven or contradictory.

Still, knowing the basic ideas about tornadoes can shed some light on how an average person should deal with tornadoes. Here are some basic tornado facts:

· Watches vs. Warnings - A watch essentially advises the people of an area that a tornado may occur due to an impending storm and other unstable weather conditions. A warning, on the other hand, tells the people that a tornado has been spotted and the people should seek safe places. But many tornadoes occur too fast that a warning is sometimes too late.

· Multi-vortex Tornado vs. Multiple Tornadoes - A multi-vortex tornado is just a large tornado circulation which has several sub-vortices that move around the center of this tornado circulation. Multiple tornadoes, on the other hand, make up a series of tornadoes that is also called an outbreak.

· Cyclonic and AnticyclonicTornadoes - Cyclonic tornadoes usually occur in the north and the wind direction is counter-clockwise. The anticyclonic tornadoes occur in the south and the wind direction is clockwise. But this may not be the case for all tornadoes. Some scientists have observed a pair of tornadoes in which one is cyclonic and the other is anticyclonic.

· Wedge or Rope Tornadoes - Wedge tornadoes are those with larger bases. These are the ones described as “fat twisters” The thinner ones, with narrow bases, are called rope tornadoes. Some may assume that wedge tornadoes are stronger due to their sheer size, but the size of the tornadoes have nothing to do with how much damage a tornado can cause. That is, some rope tornadoes can wreak more damage than some wedge tornadoes.

· The Waterspout - This is a tornado that happens over water. It can easily capsize small boats and can damage ships. But waterspouts are not recorded as tornadoes, unless they travel and reach land.

· The Enhanced F-Scale - This scale, based on the original F-scale developed by Dr. T. Theodore Fujita, was created to classify tornadoes according to the damage that they have caused. But such a scale is still largely arbitrary and mainly influenced by the subjective views of scientists and meteorologists.

· The Turtle - It is a low-lying armored probe that is placed in a tornado so that the drop in pressure can be determined. The engineer/storm chaser, Tim Samaras recorded a 40 millibars of pressure drop in a large twister that appeared in May 15, 2003. Then, in June 24 of the same year, Samaras got a reading of 100 millibars of pressure decrease in a tornado that occurred in Manchester.