A is a funnel running from a cloud base down to the sea surface, and it looks like a tornado that wandered offshore. Most of what circulates about them is anecdote and photographs. A review gathered the open-access records of waterspouts forming anywhere on Earth between 2000 and 2022 and analyzed where they cluster. Does the geography follow anything?
Three regions dominate. The analysis highlights the Mediterranean Sea, the Gulf of Mexico with the adjacent Atlantic, and the Great Lakes as the main areas of waterspout formation. The countries registering the most cases annually are the USA, Italy, Greece, Russia and Turkey. The review also identifies the main factors in waterspout above a water surface and sets out a of their structure.
A waterspout is a rotating funnel joining a cloud base to the sea, and it is one of those phenomena far better represented in photographs than in data. The reason is practical: they are brief, often far from shore, and no observing network is pointed at them.
This review gathered what exists. It presents an overview of waterspout studies worldwide, gives the best-known schematic models of their formation, and identifies the main factors in their genesis above a water surface. on waterspouts formed on Earth from 2000 to 2022 were collected and analyzed.
Three main areas of formation stand out: the Mediterranean Sea, the Gulf of Mexico with the adjacent Atlantic, and the Great Lakes. The countries with the largest number of annual registrations are the USA, Italy, Greece, Russia and Turkey, and the frequency of occurrence in each was estimated.
The review also summarizes known waterspout characteristics from direct and remote measurements, and describes a conceptual scheme of their structure. Russian cases are analyzed separately, with statistics for the Black Sea coast and a map of landfalls there. Read the geography with the obvious caution: a climatology built from open-access reports records where people watch as much as where waterspouts occur.
wat. Waterspouts cluster in the Mediterranean, the Gulf of Mexico and the Great Lakes, which is also where warm water meets cooler air and light winds.
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Clustering in warm enclosed seas and large lakes points at the ingredients: water warmer than the air above it and weak wind shear, which is a different recipe from a land tornado.
How do we know?
Kalmykova collected and analyzed open-access data on waterspouts formed worldwide from 2000 to 2022, summarized characteristics from direct and remote measurements, and mapped landfalls along the Russian Black Sea coast.
What is still unknown
The counts come from open-access reports, so they track where people watch and report rather than where waterspouts form. Countries with long coastlines and many observers will register more of them for that reason alone.
Learn something?
Where to next
Who punches an almost perfect circle through a layer of cloud?clouds
Can you hear a coral reef recovering?sea
What makes those hanging pouches on the underside of a storm cloud?clouds