A whirling mini-tornado tore two sheets of galvanise off a Warrenville warehouse, and uprooted more than 200 yards of irrigation tubing from a garden yesterday.
Eyewitnesses said they saw a long, slender, funnel-like cloud in the sky just around 12.30 pm. "It was twirling around something that looked like a thick black cable," said Amanda Khan, who recorded the image on her cellphone from her Cunupia home. She said villagers came out of their homes and looked on in amazement at the phenomenon, some even wondering if the tornado would hit their homes. The Meteorological Office received reports that the tornado ripped off galvanise from Sheik Lisha Ltd on Southern Main Road.
The black cable Khan noticed in the cloud could have been the 200-yard-long irrigation tubing, they said. The Met Office said a funnel cloud started to form around 12.30 pm, but lasted only 15 minutes, as conditions were not enough to sustain it. A met officer, who asked not to be identified, explained that once the funnel cloud touched ground, it was classified as a tornado. "Usually for a funnel cloud to occur, conditions are supposed to be light wind and high temperatures, which is 34 degrees Celsius and over," said a meteorologist.
"What is surprising is that conditions yesterday didn't go up as high as we wanted. The temperature at Piarco was 32.8 degrees Celsius." He said, however, that it was possible that the temperature at Warrenville could have been higher than at Piarco, hence the reason for the occurrence. "If the temperature was much higher than it was in the area, the funnel cloud would have lasted longer." He added that the disturbance was in no way linked to rainy conditions during the past week.
�2 Tornado
A tornado is a funnel cloud that touches land. It is a violent, dangerous, rotating column of air which is in contact with both the surface of the earth and a cumulonimbus cloud or, in rare cases, the base of a cumulus cloud.
Tornados come in many sizes but are typically in the form of a visible condensation funnel, whose narrow end touches the earth and is often encircled by a cloud of debris and dust. If a funnel cloud occurs over water it is called a watersprout. Most tornadoes begin as funnel clouds, but many funnel clouds do not make ground contact and so do not become tornadoes.
Source: www.wikipedia.org