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Wild Winds: Twisters, Tornados, Dust Devils, Whirlwinds & Waterspouts

A waterspout off the Kerry coast.

Rare sighting of a waterspout in County Kerry
By Barra BestBBC News NI Weather Presenter
  • 29 August 2020

Waterspout
Image copyright GLORIA JEAN KELLER

"The people were running to the pier shouting 'look at that, look at that'."

A photographer and her family were treated to a rare sight while travelling from County Kerry to Connemara in County Galway. A waterspout formed while they were waiting for a ferry at Tarbert Ferry terminal in County Kerry on Thursday.

"It was fascinating," said Gloria Jean Keller. "This is the first time I've ever seen something like this. I'm a photographer and always have my camera with me."
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Ms Keller continued: "I was waiting for the ferry with my son and husband and I saw something coming down from the sky. ...

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53953011
 
ramonmercado said:
A waterspout off the Kerry coast.

Rare sighting of a waterspout in County Kerry
By Barra BestBBC News NI Weather Presenter
  • 29 August 2020

Waterspout
Image copyright GLORIA JEAN KELLER

"The people were running to the pier shouting 'look at that, look at that'."

A photographer and her family were treated to a rare sight while travelling from County Kerry to Connemara in County Galway. A waterspout formed while they were waiting for a ferry at Tarbert Ferry terminal in County Kerry on Thursday.

"It was fascinating," said Gloria Jean Keller. "This is the first time I've ever seen something like this. I'm a photographer and always have my camera with me."
1px transparent line

Ms Keller continued: "I was waiting for the ferry with my son and husband and I saw something coming down from the sky. ...

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53953011
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Believe it or not. Once when fishing in sub-arctic Canada we saw one coming down the lake. Man we beached the boats Fast it came out of no-where, bit scary. They get some weird weather up there.
 
Vid at link.

Gateshead motorist films 'tornado' hitting parked car

A motorist has filmed what appears to be a tornado winding through a car park before hitting her vehicle. Lucy Lyon felt "very lucky" to have captured the phenomenon in Lobley Hill, Gateshead, at about 13:55 BST on Friday.

BBC weather forecaster Jen Bartram said it was "likely to be a weak tornado" and Ms Lyon's footage was "especially rare". She said there are between 10 and 20 tornadoes reported in the UK each year.

Ms Bartram said storm-chasers she has consulted "can't say with 100% certainty" it is a tornado "as we can't see the top of it coming down from the cloud. We can't see if it's reaching right up to the cloud, which would make it a tornado, or if it originates from the ground and doesn't go all the way up which would make it a dust devil. Either way it's exciting footage. As they're quite fleeting and short-lived, it's fairly rare to get them captured on camera like this. t's especially rare to get the ground motion captured."


https://www.bbc.com/news/av/uk-england-tyne-57033510
 
ramonmercado said:
Vid at link.

Gateshead motorist films 'tornado' hitting parked car

A motorist has filmed what appears to be a tornado winding through a car park before hitting her vehicle. Lucy Lyon felt "very lucky" to have captured the phenomenon in Lobley Hill, Gateshead, at about 13:55 BST on Friday.

BBC weather forecaster Jen Bartram said it was "likely to be a weak tornado" and Ms Lyon's footage was "especially rare". She said there are between 10 and 20 tornadoes reported in the UK each year.

Ms Bartram said storm-chasers she has consulted "can't say with 100% certainty" it is a tornado "as we can't see the top of it coming down from the cloud. We can't see if it's reaching right up to the cloud, which would make it a tornado, or if it originates from the ground and doesn't go all the way up which would make it a dust devil. Either way it's exciting footage. As they're quite fleeting and short-lived, it's fairly rare to get them captured on camera like this. t's especially rare to get the ground motion captured."


https://www.bbc.com/news/av/uk-england-tyne-57033510
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Dust devil. I remember seeing one when I was five or six years old, only 3-4 meters away. Scared me real good.
 
Vardoger said:
Dust devil. I remember seeing one when I was five or six years old, only 3-4 meters away. Scared me real good.
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I got hit by one when I was sailing on the Trent near Newark, Notts, last summer. (It was almost exactly a year ago: my boat log records it as 14th May 2020.)

It was a hot, almost a calm, day and my little 12 ft dinghy was making extremely slow progress upstream. I was keeping close to the bank to avoid the strongest current.

Suddenly I heard the surface of the water ruffling near to the bank. My first impression was that it was small fish leaping to avoid a predator. Then I noticed droplets of water rising a few centimetres like upwards rain, and swirling. I just had time to work out that it was a "mini whirlwind" then it hit me.

The boat went from barely crawling to pulling hard. So close to the bank, I had no room for manoeuvre, and with the wind direction completely unpredictable, I thought for a moment I was going over.

A few seconds later, the moment had passed. The boat settled down. I saw the disturbance of the water travel all the way across the river, becoming more violent when it hit the shallows on the other side. Then the dust devil crossed the field on the far bank, lifting bits of mown grass and straw which swirled slowly in a column a few metres across and probably 5 to 10 metres high.


I encountered a similar phenomenon maybe 15 years ago at a small local kite festival. Again, it was a hot, almost windless day. A few of us were hauling our kites up, hoping to catch some wind higher, but most people had given up completely and were sitting around with their kites laid out on the ground.

Suddenly "from nowhere" there came a short-lived whirlwind. Kites lifted off the ground, gyrated and sank back down; a table umbrella lifted out of its socket and travelled a few metres, colliding with the next table. The promotional flags and banners outside the vendors' stalls flapped violently. Then as quickly as it had started, it was over.


As I understand it, a dust devil typically occurs on a hot calm day. A layer of hot air forms close to the ground, heated by the sun and by the warmth of the ground itself. The hot air is trapped by a layer of cooler, denser, air a few metres up. Eventually, the buoyancy of the warm layer enables it to break through. Once it finds a gap, it all follows, swirling through the hole it has found, much like the bathwater swirls as it escapes down the plug hole.

I can certainly understand how earlier generations might have interpreted them as supernatural in origin. You go from no wind at all to a short burst of very strong wind, rotating and lifting things that would stay put in a typical steady breeze. It usually moves, sometimes leaving a trail of disruption, and then it vanishes. This could appear to be a djinn, or a spirit, or a demon, or a god, or witchcraft, or whatever else fits the prevailing cultural world view.
 
I read somewhere that guys at a small airfield discovered that they could create dust devils using those airplane landing paddles (like tennis rackets), waving them when the concrete landing strip was sufficiently hot.
 
In the painted desert area of Arizona and Utah, where the land is pink, red, and orange, and the vegetation is sparce, the dust devils are the color of the land. I have been blown off my feet by pink dust storms. It is better imagined than experienced :)
 

If I'm repeating myself by posting this, my apologies. Oh, and pardon the swearing - we don't often get willy willies this large...It was close to a Kilometre away from where I was standing.

Big bugger eh...
 
The Gateshead 'tornado' certainly looked like and behaved like a dust devil, but the dynamics in the area at the time were if anything more supportive of a weak convergence zone tornado. Sadly the video doesn't give us any idea of whether this was a funnel cloud that touched down, or a surface-based spinup.
There's some ambiguity about many weak, short-lived vortices, which is why in the US in particular, terms like 'landspout' and 'gustnado' are used to try to differentiate them from classic tornadoes associated with mesocyclonic storms.
Here in the UK, everything that spins tends to be described by the media as a 'mini tornado', reflecting the fact that although we get more of them than is generally realised, they're usually puny affairs, and we don't have to concern ourselves with them very much.
 
Check this out.

A rare tornado tore through southeastern Czech Republic, killing at least one person and injuring hundreds of people, authorities said.

The tornado was formed late on Thursday during a series of strong thunderstorms that hit the entire country.

Seven towns and villages have been badly damaged, with entire buildings turned into ruins and cars overturned. Over 120,000 households were without electricity.

Some 360 extra police officers were sent to the area together with the military.

https://www.irishexaminer.com/world/arid-40322057.html
 
Mungoman said:
Much relief on hearing there were no casualties, and yet, I believe that it is not uncommon to suffer Tornadoes in parts of the UK.
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Like with most weather phenomena in the UK, compared to the rest of the world they are a bit lack luster and disappointing. Our heat waves result in a week of hosepipe bans, our blizzards cause a few tailbacks on the motorway, our floods affect a few dozen houses, compared to some countries we have it pretty easy.
 
The UK actually has more tornadoes per area than any other country. ... During that period the country experienced an average of 34 tornadoes every year


Something rather interesting...I wonder if it's true - after all it was on the WWW.
 
Mungoman said:
The UK actually has more tornadoes per area than any other country. ... During that period the country experienced an average of 34 tornadoes every year


Something rather interesting...I wonder if it's true - after all it was on the WWW.
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I did hwar 5hat somewhere
 
This weather related blog page presents the following, attributed to the Guinness Book of Records:
Between 1980 and 2012, England experienced 2.2 tornadoes per year per 10,000 square kilometres (3,861 square miles) – which equates to one per every 4,545 square kilometres (1,754 square miles) annually. By comparison, the entire USA (including the non-contiguous states of Alaska and Hawaii) experienced 1.3 tornadoes annually per the same area – or one per 7,693 square kilometres (2,970 square miles).
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https://www.netweather.tv/weather-f...ies-have-the-most-and-the-deadliest-tornadoes

The source is not specified in any greater detail, and the blog page is undated.

Here's the Guinness entry ...

https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/most-tornadoes-by-area
 
Vid at link.

A land devil has been filmed whipping up hay in a field in Cumbria.

The phenomenon was filmed on Thursday afternoon in Wigton by Nikki Fell who said she saw something flying past the window and grabbed her phone and ran outside to catch it on camera.

She said: "I have never seen anything like that before. There wasn't a breath of wind but the grass/hay in the field behind my garden was swirling like a mini twister."

It is caused by warm air close to the surface of the land rising rapidly and then the converging air encourages a vortex to form.

https://www.bbc.com/news/av/uk-england-cumbria-57700768
 
Rowers injured as waterspouts hits German port.

"A rare waterspout caused by a tornado has struck the German port city of Kiel, throwing people from boats and damaging property.

Several rowers out in the water were injured as winds of over 100km/h 62mph lashed the northern coast, police said. Four people were seriously hurt in Kiel's dockside area.

The roofs of some buildings were torn off and trees were uprooted.

Waterspouts occur when a tornado forms over oceans, rivers or lakes.

They usually disperse after a few minutes, but they can pose serious danger to boats that get close.

In Kiel, on Germany's Baltic Sea coast, members of a rowing club were thrown into the water and people jumped into the water to pull them to shore."

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-58729504
 
Waterspout: Tornado-like funnels form off coast of Sicilian city of Licata.


Residents of the Italian city Licata have been sharing footage of multiple waterspouts forming off the coast on Tuesday.
The southern side of Sicily has been experiencing severe weather, including torrential rain and violent winds.
Officials say multiple 'whirlwinds' touched down across the region. One man is known to have died.
A waterspout is defined as a rotating column of cloud-filled wind that forms over water. They can travel onto land, where they are then known as a tornado.
]
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(C)BBC '21




There is a video attached btw.
 
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December has been way to warm.

Tennessee and Kentucky had a terrible night and possibly 100 people dead from tornadoes.

Our immediate area was lucky, and we still have electricity.
 
The tornado that hit 4 states was a whopper of a storm. It may break the record for the longest ground tracked tornado on record (if it was just a single tornado)
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/weathe...tates-four-hours-leaving-trail-death-rcna8465

The tornado that devastated the town of Mayfield was produced by a parent thunderstorm that traveled more than 230 miles across four states over the course of four hours.

This event was caused by a volatile atmospheric set up that was primed to produce violent and long-track tornadoes. Friday featured unseasonably warm and record-setting temperatures that felt more like Spring than mid-December. This warmth, combined with high humidity, provided ample fuel for the storms.
 
charliebrown said:
December has been way to warm.

Tennessee and Kentucky had a terrible night and possibly 100 people dead from tornadoes.

Our immediate area was lucky, and we still have electricity.
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Glad you’re ok.
 
Thanks for your concern and again our area was so lucky.

The pictures particularly from Kentucky reminded me of the old black and white film from after the atomic bomb was dropped in Japan, just total destruction.
 
I've been watching the pictures from Kentucky on the news, as @charliebrown says it looks like a massive bomb has gone off. Whole towns wiped out. Over a hundred dead so far. Really scary and tragic.
 
This more massive dust devil spun up over an iron mine in China, and the dust it sucked up gave the whirlwind a sinister color.

Massive black dust devil spotted in China
Wed, May 18, 2022, 10:11 AM
A large dust devil was seen spinning through the city of Tangshan, China, on May 16. The dust devil formed over an iron mine and had picked up some of the dust turning it black.
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https://www.yahoo.com/video/massive-black-dust-devil-spotted-141100893.html

 
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