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Videos: Small Tornado Touches Down In Southern California
First came the flash floods, terrifying mudslides, and exotic venomous snakes, then came the tornado. Is this a sign of the end times in Southern California?
Inland Empire residents witnessed a small tornado touch down in Menifee on Saturday afternoon, around 2:45 p.m. Although it looked enormous, it was simply a landspout, which is a tornado that forms when winds converge and the air starts to rise. Their more famous and destructive cousins form from powerful storms. Landspouts tend to be much weaker and the one from yesterday afternoon caused no reported injuries or damage, according to KTLA. However, as The Press Enterprise points out, there was a landspout in 2012 that created a small mess in Nuevo.
As the National Weather Service explains, breezes coming from opposite directions in the Elsinore Convergence Zone were what led to the landspout.
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Here is a quick explanation about the recent landspout tornado near Menifee, CA.
Posted by US National Weather Service San Diego California on Saturday, October 17, 2015
#Landspout in #Menifee, CA Saturday afternoon. Video by Lorri Ficklin - it formed in the #ElsinoreConvergenceZone pic.twitter.com/5ltgNak409
— Anthony Yanez (@AnthonyNBCLA) October 18, 2015
@weatherchannel is this a tornado? This is in menifee, ca @mikeseidel @JimCantore @mikebettes pic.twitter.com/wnfzFCh64g
— Travis Wilson (@TWilson919) October 17, 2015
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