Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by thaumasiotes 535 days ago
> In the south pacific and indian ocean, they are called cyclones instead, so there's really three names.

This is not true of American English, where "cyclone" unambiguously refers to a tornado.

1 comments

I'm going to disagree with you there. Anecdotally, I've lived in tornado alley my whole life and nobody has ever referred to a tornado as a cyclone in real-life conversation, although I'd know what they're referring to based on context clues.

Outside the heartland, the NHC categorizes many storms below the level of hurricane (64 knot sustained winds) as various kinds of cyclone (tropical cyclone, extratropical cyclone, potential tropical cyclone, post-tropical cyclone, alongside depressions).

In fact, in meteorology terms, a tornado is definitively different from a cyclone (a column of rotating area vs an area of area rotating around a low-pressure system). Hurricanes and typhoons are both kinds cyclones.