Killer Tornado Outbreak In Poland (Video Links)

[martinastro]

You have no doubt heard about this as it made international news. Here are some amazing video clips of the event.



This was the scene from inside a bus...



Aftermath and damage



Big hail (images)

http://forum.lowcyburz.pl/viewtopic.php?f=163&p=17209#p17209

[Roman White]

Those are really amazing! I couldn't believe those ice balls with 5-10cm in diameter are hail! 
I have never seen hail larger than 2cm. And there wasn't any hail here in Poltava since June 2007

This tornado pushes a question to discuss. Although tornadoes are usual in the USA, appearing several for year, I didn't think before that serious tornadoes are possible in Europe.
Who can tell me, how often tornadoes like this one occure in Europe? Maybe with the global warming they become to occure more often in Europe, and they will go deep inside the continental Europe, where tornado is a rarity?

[martinastro]

Europe can produce some very powerful tornadoes and supercells. In the UK alone we get more tornadoes per unit area than anywhere else although these tend to be weaker than the ones in the states with powerful tornadoes being few and far between. The last big one was in London a few years back.

Mainland Europe itself gets alot of vortex phenomena, tornadoes, waterspouts, funnel clouds etc and big hail events. Keep an eye on the ESTOFEX forecast for these major events in the future as they predicted the Poland outbreak very accurately.

Here's some basic info from wikipedia but a deep search will be needed on the net...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_tornadoes_and_tornado_outbreaks

Some history from TORRO

http://www.torro.org.uk/TORRO/research/whirlextreme.php

[Roman White]

Thanks for those links, Martin. Watching that statistics on Wikipedia I see that powerful tornadoes appear much often in W, C and S Europe than in E Europe. The only powerful tornado in E Europe for last 50 yrs. was in 1984 in Russia (Ivanovo, Yaroslavl). And I've found nothing on the web about powerful tornadoes in Ukraine. 

But that's about powerful ones, not about "small" tornadoes.
On Aug.12, when I was in Feodosiya, I was shocked when watching the evening news. A tornado arrived over land in Kamenskoye village (25km NE of Feodosiya) and moved to the Azov Sea. Several buildings left without a roof and several cars broken.
!!! And what is most interesting: I saw only clear skies with some Ci and Cs and low to moderate wind speed while a tornado was 25 km away from me!