JoshuaK
Weather Guru
Reged:
Posts: 159
Loc: Lakeland, FL
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Question about Storm Formation - July 3rd, 2008 incident
Sat Jul 05 2008 08:03 PM
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I was at work last Thursday evening when I observed a rapidly firing up thunderstorm in West Lakeland, caused I believe by the convergence of the East Coast and West Coast seabreezes. The storm quickly grew intense, and I was watching a strange cloud formation on the SW side of the storm when I spotted a rotating mass of cloud in a rain free zone. As I continued watching, I spotted a funnel cloud peeking it's nasty cone out of the bottom of the cloud, and promptly reported it to the local NWS office in Ruskin. I continued to watch the funnel cloud move east before it disappeared into the non-rain free portion of the storm.
Now, onto the question of what I observed next, and did not report. About three-four minutes after disapperance of said funnel, I watched in amazement as a rather large rotating mass of thunderstorm formed into an upside down bowl shaped, and out of the center of the bowl emerged a massive wall cloud, also rotating, that proceeded to suck up lots of ground clutter clouds into the storm.
Now, a few days after the fact, I find myself in doubt as to whether or not that was in fact a wall cloud, or just a massive funnel cloud that I observed. It looked like a wall cloud from videos I've seen on TV, but I don't remember seeing the inverted bowl shape around the wall cloud from those videos, so I thought I'd ask people here for their expert opinion or knowledge on the matter.
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