Weekend boaters and Fort De Soto Park visitors were treated to a rare weather spectacle Sunday when two waterspouts spun up over Tampa Bay east of Anna Maria Island.
While waterspouts are as ordinary in Florida as tornadoes in Oklahoma, it’s not every day you’d see a pair dance along the coast, said Stephen Shiveley, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service’s Ruskin office.
“In the Midwest, if you see a double tornado, that’s like almost once-in-a-generation-type thing. But here it’s a little bit more common. We’ll get a double waterspout at least once every couple years,” he said. “That’s still pretty rare.”
Waterspouts, likened to tornadoes over water, can form when cool, dense gusts of air from a thunderstorm crash into a sea breeze. Wind colliding from all directions then starts to rotate and form a spout. If one crosses onto land, it can become a destructive tornado.
Luckily, the spouts on Sunday could only be marveled at from a distance and did not press well-developed, Shiveley said.
“That was the important thing,” he said. “We never got any reports of boaters impacted — that didn’t bother them.”
The Ruskin station reported the first spout about 5:30 p.m. Sunday. About five or 10 minutes later, its twin showed up. Both had dissipated within 30 minutes, Shiveley said. Photos and videos taken by those lucky enough to catch a glimpse of the waterspouts flooded social media Sunday night, some showing a close shot of one spout churning violently above the water.
“These were two pretty well-developed waterspouts that we saw, which is a little bit more unique to see than our typical waterspouts,” Shiveley said. “A lot of them are very weak — like pencil-thin ones you see off in the distance.”
What made Sunday’s spouts more uncommon was that the Tampa Bay area is not experiencing a weather “regime” that creates optimal conditions for recurrent waterspouts. Florida meteorologists typically expect waterspouts to occur in the mornings when southwesterly or westerly winds are blowing.
If easterly winds that have lately been pushing storms toward the west coast continue to dominate, waterspout formation could be kept at bay.
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