Cyclone or tornado?
I’ll try to clear up the many misconceptions in the answers given so far. Tropical revolving storms are called hurricanes in the Atlantic and eastern Pacific oceans; typhoons in the South China Sea (western north Pacific); and tropical cyclones in the Indian Ocean and in the South Pacific. While typhoon is a name used only for northern hemisphere storms, hurricanes and tropical cyclones can occur in both hemispheres. Technically a cyclone is any low pressure system in either hemisphere while an anticyclone is a high pressure system. Those countries that get tropical cyclones – including Mauritius and Australia – often drop the word “tropical” when describing the storms in the news. This means that tropical cyclones are called cyclones and the word cyclone is not used for anything else. Any reference to a cyclone in these countries means tropical cyclone. Tropical revolving storms are synoptic scale systems some hundreds of kilometres across. They can last from days to weeks on occasion
