Met Mailbag (NBC Weather Plus Meteorologists)

August 31, 2006 | 1:00 p.m. ET

Met Mailbag is your chance to have a Weather Plus Meteorologist answer your weather question. Each Thursday, our NBC Weather Pulse Blog will publish the answers to questions you send us. This week's question was answered by NBC Weather Plus Meteorologist Jackie Meretsky.

Question: What is a waterspout?
Submitted by James Kim, Los Angeles, Calif.

Answer: James, thank you for the question! I like to think of a waterspout as Mother Nature's awesome display of tornadic activity when she feels like going for a swim.

Waterspouts are simply tornadoes over water, but they form differently to the tornadoes we see on land.

Where can you commonly see waterspouts? In tropical areas where thundershowers occur frequently, like the Bahamas or around the Florida Keys.

If you're looking for a more meteorological explanation of this phenomenon then let me put it another way for you. A waterspout is an columnal vortex which looks like a funnel cloud and it is connected to a cumuliform cloud. Most waterspouts are "fair-weather" as they are not associated with a rotating updraft of a supercell thunderstorm.

In the Florida Keys alone, there are roughly 400 per year. Strong or tornadic waterspouts are associated with mesocyclones and are quite dangerous to ships, planes and swimmers.

To send a weather question to our Met Mailbag, click on this link, and check back next week to see if your question is answered!