Tornadoes in Estonia

It is often thought that tornadoes are characteristic of America only. Actually it is not true, vortices that are not much feebler than those over the ocean sometimes rage in several areas of Europe as well. This is a field where Estonia certainly is ‘among the first five’ when we calculate our tornadoes-whirlwinds-waterspouts per one area unit. In June 1988, 24 phenomena of the kind occurred in Estonia. The earliest records about local tornadoes date back to the time 200 years ago. Some of the tornadoes that have raged here definitely belong to the world-class. The monograph Estonian Tornadoes is a collective work. The authors of the book, climatologists Andres Tarand and Ain Kallis have gathered all known Estonian, German and Russian language texts on tornadoes published in journalist and scientific literature in between 1745-2015. They have systematized and analyzed all these texts and give a survey of the formation and characteristics of tornadoes, the history of research in Estonia and the statistics of occurrence.The colourful descriptions of all these whirlwinds and waterspouts that have so many different and non-translatable names in Estonian, play no mean role in the book.