Gotta see this: Rare funnel cloud spotted over Norton Sound
Posted: August 5, 2009 - 11:19 am
Dorothy Ivanoff had just taken off from the village of Koyuk Saturday in a small plane over Norton Sound when the pilot spotted a weather phenomenon that’s nearly unheard of in Alaska.
She grabbed the Canon video camera she uses to shoot clips of her kids and aimed it at the funnel cloud.
What you’re seeing is a waterspout -- a funnel-shaped, tornado-like vortex that appears over water.
“It was moving across the water so quickly, and as we got closer we could just feel this rain hit really hard on the plane. … It was just spectacular," said Ivanoff, who was raised in the village of Golovin.
She now lives in Unalakleet and works for the Bering Strait School District.
"I never seen one in my life before,” Ivanoff said.
(NOTE: If you've ever spotted one in Alaska, e-mail me at khopkins@adn.com.)
The science behind waterspouts is complicated. Wikipedia has a fairly technical entry here.
Nathan Hardin, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Anchorage, sums it up: “You have a boundary of cold and warm air close together. When an updraft associated with a shower or thunderstorm moves over the boundary, it can cause a waterspout."
Waterspouts are relatively common in warmer climates like that of the Southeastern United States, Hardin said.
But a senior forecaster at the Weather Service office in Anchorage hasn’t heard of a legitimate waterspout in Alaska in his 14 years on the job.
Waterspouts are bad news for mariners and planes but fall apart when they hit land.
For a sense of how rarely this is reported in Alaska waters, check out this 2007 APRN story about a waterspout – described here as “a seldom-seen and almost-mythical object of mariner lore” -- in Lynn Canal.
Ivanoff said she was flying at about 1,000 feet when she shot the video.
“We were getting close and the plane was just kind of bumping around from all that wind,” she said.
“Right toward the end, my camera just died. I forgot to recharge my battery that night.”
