Hurricanes, tornadoes, and thunderstorms... please help!?

Question

Please try to answer as many as you can! I really need the help! They are about thunderstorms, tornadoes, and hurricanes.

1. What areas are affected by hurricanes, tornadoes, and thunderstorms?

2. What are the ingredients in hurricanes, tornadoes, and thunderstorms?

3. Why do hurricanes, tornadoes, and thunderstorms happen?

4. What are the parts of a hurricane, tornadoes, and a thunderstorm?

5. What are the different classes of hurricanes, tornadoes and thunderstorms?

Most helpful answer will get the ten points!

PLEASE HELP!!!

THANK YOU VERY MUCH!!!!

=D

Answer 1

Geez, what is this a term project you have to do?  It seems like a final project for a college class on convection or something.  Well let me give it a shot.  If this is a huge project, maybe this will be enough to get you going in the right direction.  Good luck.

1)  Virtually everywhere is prone to at least one of the three.  

-  Hurricanes are a danger in all tropical oceans EXCEPT for reasons not totally understood, the south Atlantic.  There was one tropical cyclone a few years ago that hit southern Brazil but that was the only one ever recorded.

Furthermore they sometimes affect adjacent temperate regions (why?  see part (3)):

Gulf and east coast of US, Canada, east coast of Asia, southern reaches of Africa.

-  Thunderstorms virtually everywhere

-  Tornadoes are favored in temperate regions, where clashes of airmasses are happening.

2)  Basically, all these things happen because the atmosphere is thermodynamically unstable.  This means that either too much heat has built up in one place or another, or there is a major clash of air masses

3)  The earth is trying to correct the thermodynamic instability - trying to distribute heat away from the equator towards cooler regions (like hurricanes), or balance out the clash of airmasses (thunderstorms, and in a an un-obvious, convoluted way, tornadoes.  There's a LOT of detail in how that works).

4)  I'm not sure what you mean by this question.  But guessing what you mean (what 'tools' does the atmosphere use to create these), it boils down to the factors mentioned above in (2) plus wind, water vapor/latent heat, electrical charge (thunderstorm - another trick up mother nature's sleeve for redistributing energy).

5)  There are different categories of hurricanes and tornadoes based on strength.  Look up the "Enhanced Fujita Scale" for tornadoes and "Saffir-Simpson Scale" for hurricanes.  There's not really an analogous scale for thunderstorms.

Answer 2

1. Everywhere is affected by these storms. With hurricanes it's probably homes near the water because they get flooded,tornadoes usually happen in trailer parks.

2. Hurricanes require energy and they get it from the oceans water. The warmth in the ocean creates the hurricane.

3.I'm not really sure why they happen, they just do when all the ingredients of a storm are present.

4. The eye wall of a hurricane is the most powerful and is located at the edge of a hurricane. They eye is the center of a hurricane and that's when it's all calm. You should never go outside when it seems calm. Turn on the weather station and see if it's just the eye. If it's the eye, there's more to come and you probably wouldn't want to be out there.

5. Hurricanes are category 1-5, tornadoes are F0-F6 or F5, and severe thunderstorms can create the tornadoes.

This is about as much as I know.