Cali Waterspout + Spoiling Feb. Tornado Record

I blogged last week that last month was the first tornadoless month in history. The NWS has confirmed that this has been spoiled by a late report of a tornado spotted in Kern, California on February 27th.

According to the official report: "TRAINED SPOTTER REPORTED A WEAK TORNADO THAT LASTED ABOUT 3 MINUTES ABOUT 15 MILES NORTHEAST OF TAFT." Reports are sometimes filed days or even weeks later when new information is received. Now, we don't know the story behind this, but if the NWS initiated obtaining this report, one wonders whether this much effort would have been put into getting it, if the month hadn't held a record. It's entirely possible however that the spotter himself saw the report about the tornadoless February and decided to bring his report to light. Oddly enough, SPC has no reports at this time for the situation below.

In other Cali-related news, at 5-6 funnel clouds were sighted yesterday and ScienceDude has photos. I noticed that the top photo actually shows a waterspout because you can see the spray being kicked up from the funnel on the ocean below (some of his Commenters pointed this out as well). A Newport Beach police helicopter confirmed that the funnels were real, but as we learned during the Huntington Waterspout Hoax, not every photo you see of these funnel clouds may really be from California or really from yesterday, but based on the fact that these photos have not been spread widely via PicFog (if you search for funnel tornado or waterspout, please be careful there as that site has adult content), the photos that Sciencedude has are probably legit.