The Natural World

Waterspouts

Ok, clickbait, but I like it — and she is in Brazil! Image credit: Photo by Laura Marques on Unsplash

A chance spotting early this morning, my third sighting of a water-borne ‘tornado’. What makes these phenomena so interesting? Are they dangerous?

A waterspout near Florida. The two flares with smoke trails near the bottom of the photograph are for indicating wind direction and general speed.. Image credit: By Dr. Joseph Golden, NOAA — NOAA (http://www.photolib.noaa.gov/htmls/wea00308.htm)Image ID: wea00308, Historic NWS Collection, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=63779

How it happened

At 06:30 this morning I headed up to the boat’s cockpit to sniff the morning air and drink my tea.

We need some water to top the tanks and I looked around for rain. Yesterday we’d only caught 15 litres and I’d used that trying to resolve a problem with my engine cooling system. We have enough water for at least a week — if I don’t use the engine. But light winds will not help us much and we need to move on.

The forecast for today is for light winds (yet again), 11% thunderstorm probability and 0.5 mm of rain, for half an hour. Not much hope there then.

I scanned the horizon and there it was. A shower, about five miles away.

And embedded in it was a waterspout.

Fortunately it wasn’t headed our way.

My first waterspout

I saw it when I was a boy in West Wales, out in Carmarthen Bay on a grey, rainy day, looking out to…