They look ominous, but cold-air funnel clouds are usually harmless.
Typically before a tornado forms, it is preceded by a funnel cloud sticking out from the bottom of a supercellular (rotating) thunderstorm. While not all funnel clouds will produce a tornado, it does indicate the presence of tight rotation at the bottom of the storm, and that a tornado is possible at any moment should that rotating column of air reach the surface.
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History has taught most of us level-headed meteorologists that the prospects for success in forecasting any given weather event to break (much less shatter) a record are so poor that we usually avoid doing so on principle alone. But even the most excitable among us were staggered by the cycle of intensification experienced by Hurricane Patricia from Thursday into Friday, 22-23rd October, as it turned from just another middling, minimal hurricane skirting by the sparsely-populated coast of southwestern Mexico to a 200-mph monster.
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The first snow reports of the season across the Midwest and Northeast were reported over the weekend of October 17th, 2015. Snow was generally trace amounts but a few areas in western New York, northwest Pennsylvania, and Michigan saw an inch or more. In general, this first glimpse of winter came early compared to the averages but no records were broken in terms of the earliest measurable snow. The table shows the average date for the first measurable snowfall and the record for the earliest measured snowfall for a few major cities across the United States.
South America is not as well known for it’s wild weather as the USA’s Tornado Alley is, yet the southern continent is still home to some of the world’s strongest storms. The Pampas region in Argentina, Uruguay and southern Brazil frequently experiences these storms, making it one of the most active region for severe weather outside of North America. So what makes it so similar to the Great Plains? It really comes down to geography. Severe storms require certain ingredients to come together – primarily cold air colliding with warm, moisture rich air. In the USA, this happens when cold air from Canada meets warm air from the Gulf of Mexico. In the Pampas, cold air from Patagonia and Antarctica to the south (remember this is in the southern hemisphere, so south = cold, north = warm) meets warm air from the rainforests of Brazil. With the region being in the mid-latitudes, about as far south as Tornado Alley is north, the winds throughout the atmosphere are also very similar, allowing for severe weather “ingredients” to come together just as they do in the US.