Waterspouts hit the North Carolina coast

Added: 2026-05-16

[00:00:00]Speaking of the coast, we saw some really cool waterspouts earlier today. Pretty impressive down mostly in the Crystal Coast area, I think is where a lot of them were popping up near Morehead City. Yeah, it was interesting. While this front didn't do much for us, Tim, it got pretty dicey there on the coast. The Myrtle Beach area up towards uh Wilmington, as you mentioned.

[00:00:20]Um I saw some pretty nasty downbursts that looked like go through the Myrtle Beach area. And then offshore uh definitely had some waterspouts. That view right there is amazing. That's from the Morehead City office. So, that's a little bit further north um up towards like uh you know, Atlantic Beach area, like you said, the Crystal Coast area.

[00:00:37]Um pretty nice-looking little storms there. They've had a couple of little rough storms. They had a kind of a I wouldn't say it was a surprise, but that little kind of rogue tornado over the weekend um just inland there um from a little mini supercell that popped up. And I think the first report, Tim, that I saw coming was actually somebody on social media. Like they weren't even aware that there was a tornado till the video started coming in. And sure enough, you look at the radar, and it was an EF-1, if I'm not mistaken.

[00:01:03]Yeah, I think that was right there near Delco, which is pretty close to the coast down in Southeast North Carolina, Wilmington market. Um but you know, the thing about these storms today is you could watch them on radar. They really were spinning a little bit. And so, to go back to the waterspout pictures, if we're able to, um you have two different kinds of waterspouts that you can get.

[00:01:22]You have what's called the fair-weather kind, which just can kind of form even on a sunny day. Um this, I think, is really more of a tornadic waterspout.

[00:01:29]Would you agree, Brad? I mean, >> Yeah. it it it's kind of could have been a tornado on land and maybe just got a little extra forcing over the water. Um but it's that triangular shape. It's not the straight up and down cone. Uh so, maybe a hybrid between the two from the different pictures that we saw, but uh very impressive. And this is the type that could be dangerous. Yeah, and so yeah, you can tell visually, Tim, you're right, that this looks like a tornadic one for the reasons you mentioned. It's more wedge-shaped. And also notice the cloud base is pretty low. And it almost looks like it's part of a wall cloud.

[00:01:59]So, it's got some of the the structure of what would normally be a tornadic storm. You know, the typical fair-weather waterspouts, like you said, they're really tall and skinny, and the cloud bases are much higher up. They're, you know, usually have pretty good visibility. LCLs are kind of up there.

[00:02:13]So, yeah, this is a tornadic waterspout just from visually, and um I would love to see some video from that. That would have been pretty spectacular to see down that way. Thankfully, it was offshore, but man, if you're a boater, ooh, that's something you don't want to mess with right there because um that will toss some boats pretty easily. And when it comes ashore, it causes some issues.