One person has died and another fifteen people have been injured on the morning of Monday 24 July 2023, after a tornado hit the city of La Chaux-de-Fonds in Neuchâtel Canton, Switzerland, close to the border with France. The person killed is described as having been in their fifties, and to have died when they were hit by a falling crane from a construction site. Damage has been reported to a village hall, a church, a school and about fifteen houses in Switzerland, and about thirty houses on the French side of the border, although no injuries have been reported in France. The storm is reported to have been associated with a thunderstorm which swept along the north side of the Jura Mountains, bringing with it winds gusting at up to 217 km per hour.
Thunderstorms occur when warm, moist bodies of air encounter cooler, drier air packages. The warm air rises over the cooler air until it rises above its dew point (the point where it cools to far to retain its water content as vapour), and the water precipitates out, falling as rain, sleet or hail. Warm moist air passing over the surface of the Earth acts as an electrical generator, creating a negative charge in the cloud tops and a positive charge at the ground (or occasionally in a second cloud layer). The atmosphere acts as an electrical insulator, allowing this potential to build up, until water begins to precipitate out. This allows a channel of ionised air to form, carrying a current between the clouds and the ground, which we perceive as lightning.
Tornadoes are formed by winds within large thunderstorms called super cells. Supercells are large masses of warm water-laden air formed by hot weather over the sea, when they encounter winds at high altitudes the air within them begins to rotate. The air pressure will drop within these zones of rotation, causing the air within them so rise, sucking the air beneath them up into the storm, this creates a zone of rotating rising air that appears to extend downwards as it grows; when it hits the ground it is called a tornado.
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