By Jessica Walker & Heather Locy

Do you ever want to know about tornadoes and their sense of direction? Well this is the exact place you want to be. The purpose of this essay is to find out how a tornado affects debris. Today I am going to share with you about the basics, the idea and reason I decided to do this report on tornadoes and the results and information on our experiment.

Let’s start off with the basics. A tornado is a cumulus, rotating, and dangerous cloud. Scientists are not sure of what causes a tornado but there theory is that most of the time a thunderstorm and then strong winds causes a tornado. No matter what size, shape or form all tornadoes are incredibly strong. Now you have the basics lets move on.

Before I had found any information on tornadoes, I was clueless about tornadoes. I had no information whatsoever. So, I thought that I would learn about them here. Basically my question is “How does the direction of the tornado effect the debris?” Of course, it wasn’t so easy finding information so I went to FAQ (frequently asked questions) online and found my information there.

Now lets get to the point. In my experiment, I decided to use two two-liter bottles and a connecter. Each trail I used one tablespoon of sparkles to represent the debris. I decided to turn the top liter bottle left, right and no spin. We timed how long it would take to get the debris out of the top liter bottle to the bottom liter bottle. Here are our results:

Data

	Trial 1	Trial 2	Average
No spin	3 min. 20sec	2 min. 30.sec	2 min. 33 sec.
Spin left	40 sec.	45 sec.	42 sec.
Spin right	32 sec.	35 sec.	33 sec

Observations

No spin

The debris was going in slow. The debris went in all directions. Most of the debris stays at the surface. There was no tunnel at all. The debris stuck to the sides of the wall and many bubbles were created.

Spin Left

There was a lot of debris on top. There debris turned left.

Spin right

There was no debris on the sides or the top. The debris all turned right.

Conclusions

I learned a lot from my data. Basically with no spin at all the debris will slowly fall. With a spin left or right the debris falls faster. Things that I happened to come across while I was looking for information was in the northern hemisphere the tornadoes turn counter clockwise. In the southern hemisphere, the tornadoes turn clockwise.

Of course, in my project I experienced some difficulties. On of them was choosing a question. I knew nothing of tornadoes so I thought I would do that. Another problem was getting the report done. Computer problems kept interfering but we finally got it. A future question I still have about tornadoes is “When do most tornadoes occur?” Thank you for reading.