“That’s kind of wild. Is that a waterspout?” Michael Bianculli from Walpole said as he took his normal daily walk around Boston’s Pleasure Bay, near Castle Island, on Tuesday morning.In Bianculli’s video, two waterspouts are clearly visible, traveling toward him, across the waters of Pleasure Bay.”What makes these waterspouts even more unique is that the closer waterspout seems to be rotating clockwise, which is opposite most funnels, spouts and tornadoes,” sister station WCVB’s StormTeam 5 meteorologist A.J. Burnett said.”The spout seemed to go a lot higher than a few feet, but not sure if it went all the way to the clouds,” Bianculli said in an email.The angle of the video makes it difficult to tell whether or not the swirl extends up to the base of the cloud, which would make it a true waterspout.”There’s definitely two eddies there, and perhaps both of them got caught in some very shallow instability to get the eddy to spin up,” a representative from the National Weather Service in Norton said.Nearby Boston Logan Airport was likely set up to use runway 4R, which would have incoming aircraft flying directly over Castle Island on approach at very low altitudes. It is most likely that the exhaust or wake from landing aircraft could have produced this phenomenon.
“That’s kind of wild. Is that a waterspout?” Michael Bianculli from Walpole said as he took his normal daily walk around Boston’s Pleasure Bay, near Castle Island, on Tuesday morning.
In Bianculli’s video, two waterspouts are clearly visible, traveling toward him, across the waters of Pleasure Bay.
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“What makes these waterspouts even more unique is that the closer waterspout seems to be rotating clockwise, which is opposite most funnels, spouts and tornadoes,” sister station WCVB’s StormTeam 5 meteorologist A.J. Burnett said.
“The spout seemed to go a lot higher than a few feet, but not sure if it went all the way to the clouds,” Bianculli said in an email.
The angle of the video makes it difficult to tell whether or not the swirl extends up to the base of the cloud, which would make it a true waterspout.
“There’s definitely two eddies there, and perhaps both of them got caught in some very shallow instability to get the eddy to spin up,” a representative from the National Weather Service in Norton said.
Nearby Boston Logan Airport was likely set up to use runway 4R, which would have incoming aircraft flying directly over Castle Island on approach at very low altitudes. It is most likely that the exhaust or wake from landing aircraft could have produced this phenomenon.
