The main purpose of the English version of these pages is to bring a basic information about Czech and Slovak tornadoes to the international community (namely tornado statistics). In contrary, the main goal of the Czech/Slovak version of these pages is to provide a basic information not only about tornadoes in our region, but also about tornadoes and similar phenomena in general (description, definitions, ...). For this reason the contents of the Czech/Slovak and the English versions differ quite substantially (the English version being significantly briefer).
The first version of these pages in Czech appeared back in 1996, when the notion of tornadoes in our countries was rather very low. Probably the boom of Internet (in Czechia and Slovakia especially in 1997 - 1999) in conjunction with these pages, plus several TV programs or movies that appeared in our countries within couple of last years, has helped significantly in educating our public. This effect was obvious namely in the year 2000 when we recorded a significant increase of documented tornadoes, learning about several of them first (or only) by e-mail. Therefore we assign the increase of the recorded tornadoes in 2000 namely to improved awareness of these by our public, as well as to a higher degree of attention devoted to tornadoes and related phenomena by official authorities.
As regards tornado occurrence frequency in our country, an interesting comparison can be done with adjacent countries. E.g., taking into account the size ratio between Czech republic and Germany (1:4.5), the number of tornadoes recorded in Czechia in the year 2000 (5 proved) closely matches the number of cases recorded in Germany in the same year.
Presently, only a part of the English version is available, I hope to complete the rest soon.
Last modified: 17 May 2001
Back to the main page