Final answer:
Tornadoes are rotating storms, often accompanied by strong winds and descending from clouds as funnel shapes, resulting from wind speed variations and rotation in supercell thunderstorms. Hurricanes are large storm systems forming over warm ocean waters, whose rising warm air and low-pressure centers lead to heavy rains and cyclonic wind patterns influenced by the Coriolis force. Both phenomena highlight nature's power, causing widespread damage and demonstrating the energy present in Earth's atmospheric systems.
Step-by-step explanation:
Tornadoes and hurricanes are awe-inspiring meteorological phenomena that involve complex atmospheric dynamics. Tornadoes, often associated with severe thunderstorms called supercells, exhibit rotational motion around a vertical axis. These powerful storms emerge due to differing wind speeds at various atmospheric levels, like the strong cold winds of the jet stream contrasting with milder winds from the Gulf of Mexico. The air column rotates, becomes vertical, and intensifies into a tornado, sometimes achieving wind speeds as high as 500 km/h. They often descend from clouds in funnel-like shapes and can cause immense destruction, including blowing houses away and embedding debris in trees.
Hurricanes form over warm ocean waters, typically exceeding 80 °F. The warm air rises, causing lower pressure and drawing in more air, which creates the storm's circulation. The rising air cools and condenses, leading to heavy rains, while the Coriolis force imparts a cyclonic rotation dependent upon the hemisphere—in the Northern Hemisphere, hurricanes rotate counterclockwise, while in the Southern Hemisphere, they rotate clockwise. Hurricanes progress from tropical depressions to named tropical storms and finally to hurricanes as their wind speeds reach or exceed 74 miles per hour.