Tornado diagram
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Tornado diagrams, also called tornado plots or tornado charts, is a special type of Bar chart, where the data categories are listed vertically instead of the standard horizontal presentation, and the categories are ordered so that the largest bar appears at the top of the chart, the second largest appears second from the top, and so on. They are so named because the final chart appears to be one half of a tornado.
Tornado diagrams are useful for sensitivity analysis - comparing the relative importance of variables. The sensitive variable is modeled as uncertain value while all other variables are held at baseline values (stable). - Reference/source: PMBOK Guide Fourth Edition pg. 298 (2005 pg. 257). For example, if a decision maker needs to visually compare 100 budgetary items, and wishes to identify the largest ten items, it would be nearly impossible to do using a standard bar graph. However, in a tornado diagram of the budget items, the top ten bars would represent the top ten largest items.
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