This ain't your 7 year old's tornado size comparison video

Honestly, though, there's a lot of tornado size comparison videos out there, but none truly capture the scale of these behemoths of the sky. I'm here to set that record straight. Let's take a look at the real sizes of a handful of the more notable tornadoes in meteorological history, and hopefully you can get a little bit of that sense of scale that one gets when actually confronted by one of these monsters.

Footage used:    • Video  

Music playlist:    • On The Nile  

Clarification bulletin: this video discusses size within the confines of the definition of tornado as described by the glossaries of the American Meteorological Society and World Meteorological Organization, that being a rotating column of air extending from ground level to the base of a cumuliform cloud (i.e. cumulus humilis, cumulus congestus, cumulonimbus, etc.). This video does not discuss parent circulation or vorticial structure of the tornado beyond the LCL, and although the actual tornadic column may rise for several miles beyond the ground, semantically the tornado terminates at the cloud base.