An atmospheric anomaly occurs outside the front of my workplace on a constant basis. The architecture of my building being tall and set back slightly from the sidewalk, next to lower buildings closer to the sidewalk, and I'm sure an endless number of special angles and such, creates a mini-tornado at the bottom of the stairs.
The mini-tornado remains within a few feet of the ground and whirls in a clockwise direction. It would just be an annoying little windy area, as much of the front of the building is (which again you don't' fully realize unless you're wearing a fluffy skirt or dress), except the little whirling dervish manages to regularly acquire an array of dried leaves and wrappers to whip around, making the shape and continual swirling quite clear to see. Mind you, I don't know where the wind manages to find so many dead leaves this time of year, especially considering that the sidewalk sweeper seems in constant action and there aren't really many trees in the area, but it seems to manage just fine.
Today it's raining and so the cyclone is currently absent due to lack of dry leaves to whip about, but when I was leaving yesterday the whirl was such that passers by were slowing to gawk and laugh. While I suppose I see this particular oddity on a regular basis, it really is quite a bizarre situation. So much so that I can't think of another example. I'll therefore have to enjoy my daily tornado as much as I can before the big office move at the end of the month, as the chances of another cyclone seem low.
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4 comments:
What an odd little thing if it rotates clockwise instead of counterclockwise, which is more common in the Northern Hemisphere. Must have something to do with the wind direction and angles, I suppose. I would think an engineer could figure that out!
Haha, I was totally going to query the clockwise thing but I got beat.
We used to have a tornado anomaly at my high school but that went counterclockwise...
off on my normal tangent... normally when we get abnormal weather the whole country shuts down - it's comedy! i guess its because we are not used to it and people cant drive in snow etc. a good example was in my third year at university when we got really really heavy snow - lets just say shops couldn't keep up with the demand for sledges! anyways i had about 4 really important assignment deadlines coming up in a two week period and i was a stressed monkey burning the midnight oil - anyways all of a sudden the university announced that it was closing for an "amount of time" due to the weather and all deadlines would be put back the same amount of time! this was AMAZING! like they all got finished to a high standard and not having lectures meant i could spend all day working on them... going back to a previous blog the rumour behind this was that the university's insurance did not cover them for the weather! i think this lasted for about a week...it ended up being quite confusing - everything got put back a week including exams etc...
You guys had me paranoid about my clockwise assertion! Luckily there was a mini-cyclone when I was walking in this morning and it was most certainly whirling in the clockwise direction! The think the whole phenomenon has to do with the angles of all the buildings in the area!
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