That is certainly where the deadliest of them originate. (The Tristate Twister of 1925 travelled over 200 miles, killing almost 200 people and injuring another 2000.)

Whilst the United States are home to the biggest and most destructive tornadoes, they have been recorded on every continent - even Antarctica - and the UK has the highest reported frequency per unit area, in the world. We get more than our fair share of tornadoes in the West Country.

Nature loves a vortex. Remember Richardson'’ quotation:

Big whirls have little whirls that feed upon their velocity, and little whirls have lesser whirls, and so on, to viscosity.

Vortices are easy to induce in a column of water, but given the right atmospheric conditions - moist, rising air, instability aloft and a change of wind direction with height, we can produce some twisters of our own.

The footage of a funnel cloud captured by Bill Shackleton at Pylle in Somerset in August 2002 did not quite make it to full tornado status as it failed to touch down. But tornadoes have been reported around the Chew Valley and over Salisbury Plain in particular.

Even if they don’t build from the cloud down, vortices can develop from the ground up as the dust devils that can frequently be seen over the farmland across the region testify.

The biggest tornadoes can be killers. Fortunately fatalities in this country are rare which is just as well because we are still a long way from being able to predict when and where they will occur.

But with global warming they could well become a more common sight in the West in future.