York County Funnel Cloud Tuesday June 9th, 2015

Yesterday at around 6:15 pm EDT a series of small showers rapidly developed in central and northern York Co. These showers weren’t severe and other than the dangerous cloud to ground lightning they started to produce, they were frankly very tame little thunder showers. Yet they managed to produce an odd type of funnel cloud.

These were just a handful of pictures I received from around the Clover and York areas. All show what appears to be a “cold air” funnel except we really didn’t have cold air aloft. It actually looks more like a landspout which is similar to a waterspout but over land.

Landspouts are defined this way.

Landspouts form during the growth stage of convective clouds by stretching boundary layer vorticity upward and into the cumuliform tower’s updraft. They generally are smaller and weaker than supercellular tornadoes and do not contain a mesocyclone or pre-existing rotation in the cloud.

This is not a tornadic storm and not a tornado more of very weak funnel like you would see in a waterspout near the coast. Looks cool but in most cases these are absolutely nothing to worry about.

On radar, you could see how quickly these showers developing and there was almost no wind or and no rotation indicated on doppler radar in these rapidly developing showers.