Video follows. The National Weather Service in Eureka writes:
A waterspout developed over Humboldt Bay Thursday, January 25th around 4:40 pm and moved through the Woodley Island Marina, dissipating only a minute or so later. Security cameras on the island captured the waterspout moving through the marina onto the island. Thankfully, the damage reported was minor. However, because the waterspout moved onto land, it technically became a tornado. This is the first confirmed tornado in the NWS Eureka forecasting area (Mendocino, Trinity, Del Norte, and Humboldt counties) since the Fort Bragg tornado on December 5th, 1998.
Of course, I’m sure some alarmist will jump at the chance to say it happened because of “climate change”.
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Did this even rank on the Fujita scale?
F-0 since the Fujita scale is based on observable effects after the fact. i.e. Not a tornado – more like a dust devil w/o the dust.
Water demon … cousin to the dust devil
Beat me to it. Barely qualifies as a dust devil. One in rather poor health.
At least they haven’t started naming them… YET. I’m surprised they haven’t started naming wind gusts.
What? This is a very minor wind vortex, neither a water spout nor a tornado.
Greg’s comment should be read by Captain Davey Jones of Flying Dutchman fame.
/ for the full effect I mean.
We get stuff stronger than that on an average day in rural Australia. They call them willy-willies here. Basically a dust devil. Been around ever since there were people, according to legend.
Same mechanism as a tornado, but a bit smaller, and a lot browner.
Reminds me of the two waterspouts I saw spring from the same T-storm at Port Aransas, TX.
They were quite a bit bigger than this one and when they hit shore, they decayed visibly in a short time, like a braid unwinding. This one was a very weak cousin.
This must have been the smallest briefest tornado on record. A wet dust-devil.
Butt a liberal nightmare non the less
A damp squib.
It was no match for trees and infrastructure. Whoop. Out it went.
What a load of ………….
You get dozens of waterspouts/mini-tornadoes all year round every time a trough or a squall line moves through. Simply rarely seen because they are so brief and if damage occurs it’s a few tiles one shed roof and 3 deck chairs downed. Simply not news worthy.
Even happens in England!
Still, it was kind of cool.
But did the NWS name this tornado?
Retired_Engineer_Jim
January 27, 2018 at 12:15 pm
Yes, just wait…it’ll be Superspout Sandy or some such nonsence. Worse ever since records began.
Superspout Sandy? You jest: SuperSpout Squirty maybe 🙂
Squirty McSquirtface
It is to laugh… that was no Texas tornado….
I didn’t see any cows or witches being blown around by that… breeze…
So funny haha, I have seen dust devils in Nevada that are 10 times that big, are we to now believe they were really tornados?
Likewise in Eastern Washington. Sometimes there are a dozen at a time, lifting soil into the air such that it melds and produces a light brown sky. If such comes through a campsite it can ruin your day.
If a vortex is attached to a parent storm cloud, then it is a tornado as opposed to a dust devil. Dust devils form from sun-baked ground upward. Rarely a dust devil can transition into a tornado by joining a cumulus cloud that has a strong updraft – tornadoes generally form from their parent storm clouds instead.
Then there are gustnadoes, which are whirlwinds at the gust front of a thunderstorm or thunderstorm-like squall. They can connect with an overhead storm cloud and there is a bit of gray area between gustnadoes and tornadoes, but in general the storm clouds that tornadoes are attached to have rotation in them and gustnadoes don’t have rotation above them.
Waterspouts are vortices over water. They are generally classifiable as “fair weather waterspouts” or “tornadic waterspouts”, although both are usually technically tornadoes over water. A “fair water waterspout” generally forms in a hotspot of humidity over very warm water in the tropics or in the summer in the subtropics, where a cumulus cloud that is well short of being a thunderstorm is growing from the hotspot of warmth and humidity on a day that had lots of sunshine to make the surface of the water warm enough t5o make this happen, and it typically has windspeed below hurricane force. “Tornadic waterspouts” form from severe thunderstorms and nearly-thunderstorm squalls and typically have less or no dependence on sun-warmed water, and they often (not always) have hurricane-force wind.
Then there is the landspout. That is a term for small weak short-lived tornadoes over land, usually with peak wind strength barely or below hurricane force, and often with their parent storm clouds being other than mesocyclones of supercells. Many of these form in rotating areas in the updraft regions of squall lines, and these squall line rotating regions in their updrafts are generally smaller and shorter-lived than the mesocyclones of supercells. (Then there is the matter of how some thunderstorms in some squall lines can be determined as being supercells, and there is more than one kind of supercell.)
Donald L. Klipstein
January 27, 2018 at 8:47 pm
…yes, there’s Supercell Sandy…coming to a news broadcast near you soon.
Seriously though, many thanks for the illustration that life is much more complex than we thought (it’s worse than…). And I guess the science is not totally settled on the classification of these fascinating whirly things.
I presume the Martian ones are willey willeys or dust devils? No chance of one becoming a tornado…presumably we’re 4 billion years too late to see that. I wonder if you might still get them (tornados) on Titan though?
I didn’t realize the Fujita Scale went negative.
They’re called odanrots and they take you to the land of Zo.
Where I live we get tons of them…..when they cross land..they are still waterspouts
We have seen waterspouts in the Caribbean — mostly in the channel between Florida and the Bahamas — but one magnificent spout out in south of the Turks and Caicos towards Hispaniola.
That is to say, it looks magnificent as long as its a mile or two away — when it gets on a collision course with the boat — it becomes terrifying — it is a tornado, after all. Not the little parking lot dust devil in the video, but a thousands of feet tall full blown tornado.
Luckily, none ever got close enough to cause any damage.
The tornadic vortex can extend for a half-mile or more out from the funnel cloud (or funnel water), so contrary to many a silly disaster movie, you don’t need to run into the visible part of a tornado to get blown away. The funnel is an effect of the vortex, after all, not a cause.
In the winter of 87/88, I was on Hwy 1 at Point Sur. I witnessed 18 water spouts forming off the lee of Point Sur. Three times I saw paired spouts (sisters). I watched as each came ashore one after another, across the beach, up the dunes, then to where I sat in a one ton van. Several times I felt the van was lifted up onto two wheels. It was an awesome display. But I bugged out when I saw a much larger spout – far larger and darker than any of the others – as it too began to march across the beach and towards my location on the bluff.
Down here, we call them a “willy-willy”
I wonder who has the biggest willy?
Klinton????
What do you mean? A slick or a sandy willy?
I’ve seen water spouts in the Caribbean that were truly water-borne tornadoes. I’ve seen leaves swirled by more wind than that “water spout.”
If globał warming caused this twisty breeze… then I say… more power to global warming…
かわいい
It looks like those trees did a number on that poor tornado.
Better to have a F0 waterspout than this from 2012 in Australia.
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/blogs/andrew-bolt/gores-team-tries-again-to-buy-fake-evidence-of-global-warming/news-story/5cdc3baa432b628b4d535b544feb1b93
I have viewed the security camera videos from California and…….
I want my money back.
Arnold Schwarzenegger ate too many beans for lunch.
l think calling that a tornado is pushing it abit, it was on the same scale of large “whirl winds” we sometimes get here in England. l’ve seen three whirls on the same sort of scale in 1999 1990 and the mid 70’s.
The last and the best one l saw l wrote a record of the sighting.
August 6th 1999
l was driving along a road this afternoon then l saw a whirl wind in a wheat field next to it. The wheat field had recently been cut and the straw had been left in rows by the machine. The whirl wind just happened to be in the middle of one of these rows of straw. Which lead to a large amount of straw been sucked up and slowly moving in a circle that must have been 40 feet across. Been only a 100m away from it l could understand why in the days of old. That they took these things as the “work of the devil”. As it was a strange and slightly scary sight if you did not understand them.
O gee! Something weird in Cali! Well Im never…
I live at the intersection of two large valleys (in the mountains) so we get quite of few of these little whirl winds. I was even ‘hit’ by one once. I was expecting to end up in Oz but it just lifted my hat off my head. Bit disappointing.
That said, glad I don’t live where real tornadoes occur.
very underwhwlming Should be a poster child for AGW Even Mikie Mann and Goreballs would have a job manufacturing catastrophe out of this
California tornadoes are not as unusual as.many people think, and winter is prime season for California’s tornadoes.
Water spouts are legitimate tornadoes, just on water.
Just as tornadoes form, water spouts drop down from high altitude; usually from a super cell thunderstorm.
Thunderstorms kick up far more wind than that wispy whorl; water spouts are serious weather events.
That short wispy whorl wind doesn’t rate measuring on the Fujita scale, where F0 contains 40-73mph winds. That old lady’s breathe of a whorl is more at a B-0 level than a F-0.
Visible damage left by that California whorl? None.
No masts snapped,
No lines are even lifted,
No debris kicked about…
Nor is that whorl lifting surface water up throughout the vortex. It looks like the whorl barely spins the falling mist.
As so many other have already stated, it is a small dust devil type of cyclonic wind.
However, I wouldn’t be surprised if Gore purchases the film so he can claim CO2 causes more water devils. As with so much of Gore’s propaganda, it deserves a long belly laugh.
See what I wrote above here. Many waterspouts and some land-only tornadoes form from or in association with thunderstorms other than supercells, nearly-thunderstorm squalls, and even lesser cumulus clouds.