Juneau, Alaska, gets rare 'tornado' and severe thunderstorm
A rare severe thunderstorm warning was issued for Juneau, Alaska Monday, as a video of a possible tornado emerged.
A gustnado was caught on camera crossing a highway in Juneau, Alaska, on June 16. A gustnado resembles a tornado but is not connected to the base of a cloud.
A dramatic weather event unfolded in Juneau, Alaska, on Monday, as a severe thunderstorm tore through the area spinning up a tornadolike vortex.
Video emerged this week of what looked like a tornado near the city, filmed by Ernesto Quintans Rosales on Reddit. While social media sleuths thought it might be a waterspout, dust devil or landspout, the local National Weather Service (NWS) office in Juneau said it was a gustnado.
A gustnado is another type of tornado that forms when the edge of the downdraft of a severe thunderstorm -- a gust front -- causes the air to spin from the ground up, but the gustnado does not connect to a cloud. Weaker than supercell tornadoes, gustnados can still cause damage in rare instances. Since they aren't connected to a cloud, gustnadoes are not considered to be tornadoes.
High winds snapped the moorings of the docked cruise ship Celebrity Edge, causing it to drift away from the harbor.
Winds caused destruction across the city, with NWS Juneau reporting trees down in the Lemon Creek area, a canopy blew down the road in Twin Lakes, and a car's windshield was also smashed by flying debris in Rock Dump. A 49-mph gust was recorded by a weather station at in the city, and a 52-mph gust was recorded by a weather instrument on Naked Island, west of town.
The Juneau NWS office issued a severe thunderstorm warning for the city Monday, the first on record according to the Iowa Environmental Mesonet, which keeps track of warnings back to 1986. Previously, they had only issued one severe thunderstorm warning, for an area 250 miles southeast of the city, on June 27, 2019.
No tornadoes have ever been recorded near Juneau, but waterspouts were reported in 2007, 2009, and 2010 across the Inside Passage, according to TornadoArchive.com.
