Mountain = No Tornadoes?

A question that I get quite often is “Why doesn’t El Paso get tornadoes?” Most people seem to think it’s because of the mountains. That’s not the case. We can get tornadoes in El Paso it’s just that we don’t have all the necessary ingredients at the same time to get them. I often tell kids it’s like making a chocolate cookie. If we mix in the flour, eggs, vanilla, salt, baking soda, butter and chocolate chips, will it be a good chocolate cookie? Not really. We have left out the sugar! That’s how it goes with tornado development – we need all the right ingredients and we typically don’t get them at one time. What are the right ingredients? Tornadoes like to have warm and humid air near the ground with a nice south/southeast wind. The moisture and temperature difference between the surface of the ground and the higher you go up relates to instability or what we call an unstable air mass. As you get higher up in the sky we like to see colder air along with more of a west/sw wind – this is called wind shear which is a change in wind speed and direction with height. This allows the rotation for tornado development.