Comment by daveguy
15 hours ago
Also, the list of tornadoes the GP refers to in Europe are mostly F0-F2 severity. These don't often cause high fatalities and injuries in the US either (on par with what's reported there). The problem is that tornadoes in the US Midwest and Southeast are often in the F3-F5 range, which are much deadlier. An F3 tornado includes winds to 165 mph, which is considered a category 5 in the hurricane scale. They don't last nearly as long, but high intensity tornadoes can cause catastrophic damage in seconds where they hit directly, unless the shelter is literally underground.
The quantity of energy in an F5 tornado is literally on the same scale as a nuclear weapon, albeit delivered more slowly. Given that context, their ability erase towns should not be that surprising. You can't engineer a practical structure capable of withstanding those kinds of forces.
There's also that, but I didn't go to the effort of investigating the rate of various strengths. I'll bet their data explorer shows that aspect of the phenomenon too.
I suspect that a major factor is that the great plains of North America are at a lower latitude than e.g. the Eurasian steppes, so 1) there are fewer people living there and 2) the confluence of meteorological circumstances needed to generate a lot of tornadoes (and therefore a larger population of very destructive tornadoes) just aren't present anywhere else in the world.
This whole line of reasoning "Americans must be bad at house construction, look at all the destruction wrought by hurricanes/tornadoes/etc" just feels disingenuous to me. Like observing "look at how much better the British are at building volcano/earthquake proof buildings, you never hear about people losing their houses to lave in the UK!".
> 2) the confluence of meteorological circumstances needed to generate a lot of tornadoes (and therefore a larger population of very destructive tornadoes) just aren't present anywhere else in the world.
This is in fact a huge part of our tornado risk in the US. The long north-south region of mountainous/high elevation (i.e. the rockies) going into a large low elevation flat region, helps create the 'layering' of different air temperatures that cause tornadoes once the current changes enough for the top/bottom layer to turn into a column.