More strange weather…

Criccieth is a good place to see weather. It seems to attract the clouds and storms. Even on clear days there’s always something going on in the skies above the castle, big white clouds, sun dogs - heat hazes over the deep blue sea. You can stand on the pebbles and watch the far beaches of Harlech in the distance flash white with silver sunlight, or watch purple-grey fog roll down from the mountains, tumbling towards you across the bay. There’s always something.

Strange weather at Criccieth last weekend - the sky seemed to be cut into two by huge black rain clouds and a bank of symmetrical grey-white cumulonimbus. Then, as I watched, the cloud seemed to reach down and touch the sea for a minute or so. I waited. It couldn’t be could it? Yes, maybe it could, it had all the makings - perhaps I was going to see a waterspout…

According to ‘Nature’ magazine (I’m quoting here) waterspouts are not such rare phenomena in the seas around the British Isles as it is sometimes supposed. Many of those that have been observed from coast stations of the Meteorological Office are far out at sea and at times when few people are in the neighbourhood.

Well, I was in the neighbourhood last weekend and it was full of the tall, dense, Cumulonimbus clouds that you can see in the photos. Cumulonimbi are always involved with thunderstorms and intense weather conditions. Their name means ‘column rain’ in Latin, and they are caused by an atmospheric instability. Looking at the photographs you can see just how unstable they can be. Sometimes they can form alone and at other times in clusters or along a cold front in a squall line - I think that’s what we have here, a squall line. Very occasionally squall lines develop into a supercell, a severe thunderstorm with a deep, continuously-rotating updraft which often leads to waterspouts. Could it be? I waited. Yes, maybe it could, it had all the makings - perhaps I was going to see a waterspout…

But then the tube of white lifted and the cloud’s kiss on the sea was over, the thin funnel of cloud vanishing as if it had never been there.

So maybe, almost, but not quite a waterspout this time - DOUBLE CLICK the photo's to see the spout and to see one in action CLICK HERE it’s truly amazing!