Chesapeake Bay Waterspouts, Iowa Landspout
Multiple waterspouts were reported this morning on the Chesapeake Bay (see photos and video below).
The funny thing was: there was no rain associated with the "storms" on radar -- there was only a line of clouds, a "bay-breeze" boundary, moving toward the western shore.
The radar did detect the boundary (as a very low value) as it moved inland:
Waterspouts often form without major thunderstorms, from just rain showers (forming more due to a temperature difference than a supercellular structure), but it's fairly unusual to see nothing indicating rain where they are sighted.
In related news, many Social Media users were surprised to see this Tornado Warning for southern Ames, Iowa yesterday. It appeared to be surrounding a small rain shower:
It turns out that a storm spotter saw a "landspout" (a weak tornado that forms in a similar way to a waterspout, but over land) drop down out of a tiny thunderstorm, and the warning was issued out of fear that it might cause damage.
The landspout was brief, and by the time they issued the warning, the storm was already weakening. Amazingly, the Iowa Environmental Mesonet got the twister on one of their webcams (photo above and video below).
The 3-D radar image showed that the storm was not only small, it was short, contained almost entirely under 10,000 feet. You can see from the radar loop below, however, that it once looked a little more impressive than when the warning was issued.
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