Physical Geography: Wind-Based Violent Storms

Violent Storms A violent disturbance includes strong winds and usually rain, thunder, and/or lightning is called a storm. To be considered violent, storms need to led to a significant amount of damage to properties and lives. Classified as violent, storms have three categories: wind-based, water-based and other. In geography, it becomes important to know about these specific storms, how they move, where they are most common and potentially the damaged they can cause to the land and people who live in those areas. If these storms possess forceful winds causing a great amount of damage they fall under wind-based category.
Wind-based Violent Storms
Wind-based storms main ingredient is wind. The storms that use wind to create violence are thunderstorms, tornadoes, and cyclones. Numerous of these storms exist prominently in certain areas of the world, but have the capability to happen anywhere. In Physical geography, geographers track storms and record the data for future review allowing us to see patterns in weather. With the data collected geographers can tell that the thunderstorm causes the most damage yearly. …show more content…
“There can be as many as 40,000 thunderstorms each day around the world.” (Severe Weather 101, n.d.) While mostly prominent in equatorial region, thunderstorms can form in mid-latitudinal areas similar to the Gulf Coast and southeastern and western states. A thunderstorm is thought to be violent if it is accompanied by an inch of hail or more, wind over 57 mph and/or a tornado, however the atmosphere of the area needs to be ideal for a thunderstorm to occur. Thunderstorms need a certain type of atmosphere to form. There must be humid air, moisture, unequal warming at the surface and the air must be forced from a low elevation to a higher elevation causing orographic lift. Under these ideal circumstances a thunderstorm is created and can lead to flash floods, lighting, hail, and