February 18th, 2009:

If you watched our 10pm show last night, you may have seen the pictures sent to us by Don Borders.  The pictures were of a landspout near Pueblo West.  A landspout is a weaker cousin to a tornado.  While we can see some pretty unusual weather almost any time of year, landspouts are usually seen during the late Spring and Summer.  The atmosphere was extremely dry, but enough instability existed with just enough spin, to produce the landspout.  Stronger landspouts can produce wind speeds of up to 150 mph, but most are pretty weak.  This one likely had winds of 50 or 60 mph.  Either way, pretty cool to see...  Thanks Don!

Check the images below:












For some technical informaton about landspouts feel free to click on this link:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landspout  Or, you can GOOGLE "landspout" and get all the information you could ever want.

Chief Meteorologist Brian Bledsoe