Weather explainer: What is a landspout funnel cloud
AUSTIN (KXAN) — Earlier on Wednesday, many of our KXAN viewers sent us pictures and videos asking about a cloud that looked a little suspicious, especially with severe weather looming in the Central Texas area.
The photos and reports were sent in from viewers in parts of Williamson County on what may have looked like a funnel cloud rotation. However, our Chief Meteorologist Nick Bannin explained it wasn’t that at all.
“There’s not sign that this is actually on the ground, but it came in an area without a strong, or even severe thunderstorm,” he said.
Bannin added that the weather team even checked with the National Weather Service (NWS). However, there was no rotation detected in this thunderstorm.
“So we have no definitive reason about what caused this, but we can make some educated guesses based on what was happening in the atmosphere at the time, and our thoughts are that this may have been a landspout funnel cloud,” he said.
Bannin said the landspout funnel clouds or landspout tornadoes are caused by the convergence of wind boundaries coming together in one place, where air meets and then it is forced up and starts to spin.
He added that these type of funnel clouds are usually weak in nature, but in rare instances can become very strong.
“So while they’re usually weak in nature, then they can still do and cause damage. This one looked to have lasted for about a minute and a half, according to some reports we had from emergency managers in the Georgetown area,” Bannin said.
He went on to describe the cloud, saying that the clouds above the funnel or tornado don’t rotate, unlike supercell thunderstorms that rotate along with any tornado
“It’s more of a land generated spin-up, rather than one that is formed from the clouds in the sky,” Bannin said. “Think about it in some sort of way, like when you’re at the grocery store parking lot and the leaves start to spin and they go up.” That’s because air masses are colliding and being forced up because the parking lot asphalt prevents the wind from going down so it has to go somewhere.
Bannin said these type of clouds are hard to predict and detect. He said often the rotation is so low down to the ground and so brief that these can come and go without anyone noticing they were even there, specially from a National Weather Service radar perspective.
All in all, Bannin said this may have been what happened earlier today in parts of Williamson County, Granger, Leander and Georgetown and there is no confirmation of any funnel cloud actually reaching the ground there.
