Do you know your hurricane from your tornado?

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I’ve always wondered what the difference is between hurricanes, typhoons, cyclones and tornadoes. Thanks to Deborah K. Mitchell’s (@Corbin5) very useful link I’m now much more knowledgeable about these marvels of nature. It seems the terms cyclone, typhoon and hurricane are interchangeable but a tornado has some peculiarities of its own. However the terms are sometimes used in the wrong context which doesn’t help anybody. For the purposes of this discussion I’ll just use the terms hurricane and tornado. The basic difference, it seems, is that hurricanes occur over water and tornados over land. This explains why Australia has few tornadoes although they do occur. The north-west coast of Western Australia experiences several hurricanes every summer. These develop off the coast but usually don’t penetrate too far inland before becoming rain-bearing depressions. Both hurricanes and tornadoes exhibit violently rotating columns of air, cyclones do not develop into the funnel clouds so characteristic of tornadoes. Hurricanes can stretch for several hundred miles and last for hours or even several days whereas tornadoes are usually restricted to a few miles in width and last for a much shorter period. Fierce and intense damage can be caused in the path of a tornado while the longer battering of a hurricane may cause a different type of destruction. The other factor I discovered is that hurricanes, once they reach land, MAY develop into tornadoes but the reverse does not occur. Having said that, the hurricanes in the north of our state never seem to develop into tornadoes. The photo shows a wintry sky over our house. Luckily it wasn't the forerunner of a cyclone, hurricane, typhoon or tornado!