Tornado or Landspout?

The National Weather Service issued a Tornado Warning for parts of Kiowa and Prowers counties, and a trained weather spotter reported a "tornado".

I broke into programming, just to be sure viewers in that area knew there was a dangerous storm in the area, but looking at the echo on FirstAlert Doppler, it had the wrong shape and intensity to be a tornadic storm, and there was no shear (winds at different speeds or directions at different levels of the atmosphere...and you need that to get a good rotating tube of air in the updraft of the storm = tornado).

Then it struck me.....I think it was a "landspout". Here's the definition...

Landspout tornadoes are formed by thunderstorms that do not have rotating updrafts (BINGO). Wind shift lines in the lower atmosphere, such as local topography may produce, cause VERY WEAK (caps added by your author) spinning vertical tubes of air.

When a thunderstorm updraft forms over one of the weak spinning tubes of air, the tube is stretched. Stretching a rotating tube causes it to spin faster, forming a short lived and relatively weak tornado.

That seems to meet the criteria, and the bottom line is that it was NOT a "Wizard of Oz" Great Plains tornado, but it was an indicator that a storm strong enough to take notice of was moving across the eastern Plains.

As we're in the season, I'll let you know if anything of note is moving in your direction, and will NOT make the description of every storm sound like "the biggest, baddest storm that's ever hit southern Colorado".

I'll tell you about another variation, the "gustnado" in a future blog.

Landspout tornadoes are most commonly found near coastlines and along the Colorado front range.