Talk:Water spout

Waterspouts exist on a microscale, where their environment is less than two kilometers in width. Their bigger cloud that develops them can be as innocuous as a moderate cumulus, or as great as a supercell. While some waterspouts are strong (tornadic) like their land-based counterparts, most are much weaker and caused by different atmospheric dynamics. They normally develop in moisture-laden environments with little vertical wind shear along lines of convergence, such as land breezes, lake effect bands, lines of frictional convergence from nearby landmasses, or surface troughs. Waterspouts normally develop as their parent clouds are in the process of development, and it is theorized that they spin up as they move up the surface boundary from the horizontal shear near the surface, and then stretch upwards to the cloud once the low level shear vortex aligns with a developing cumulus or thunderstorm. Weak tornadoes, known as landspouts, have been shown to develop in a similar manner.[2]