SEA TORNADO OR AN ALIEN INVASION?
HOLD on to your cows, Territorians.
A rare scene like that out of an alien invasion movie was spotted mere metres off the coast of Darwin.
The Wednesday morning waterspout, documented by many NT News readers, is a weather event more commonly seen on the east coast of Australia.
However, the NT is known to get reports of one or two each wet season, including one in February last year.
Former Brisbane local Chris Wilson saw the phenomenon from her office on the tenth floor of a CBD building.
“(It) looked like a tornado on the sea, but apparently it’s known as a waterspout,” she said.
“I’ve just moved to Darwin from Brisbane … never seen such amazing weather events as I have up here.”
Bureau of Meteorology senior forecaster Billy Lynch said the weather conditions in the morning made it the perfect storm for a waterspout forming.
The Bureau’s own fact sheet on the weather event says observers describe them as looking like “the start of an alien invasion”.
They form when winds blowing in two different directions collide with each other.
“When the atmosphere is very buoyant and its also very humid, the clouds grow very rapidly and the quicker they grow the better chance there is of a waterspout forming,” he said. Despite them occurring a couple times each year, Mr Lynch said they were not known to pose a huge risk.
“They are different to a tornado, although they do look similar, because they have that funnel cloud — they’d never have the same strength as a tornado,” he said.
“Usually they will weaken out as soon as they hit the coast but they could create strong gusts of winds on the coast.”