Sometimes you end up with a hard to call situation like the 4-13 storms. I wasn't expecting anything good that day. Radar looked messy with scattered cells most of which kept dying, undercut by too much cool outflow. East of Channing I saw a thick vortex of dust getting sucked up from the ground, I raced to get closer to it. Is this a dust devil? gustnado perhaps? It was moving fast and about to cross the highway. "I've got to pull over now and start shooting or I risk losing it." Dust devils usually form in clear skies under hot conditions and light winds, however winds were gusty and the air was mediocre at best. Theory number two, is this a gustnado? Gustnados usually form ahead of a gust front and move away from it, they also tend to lack a vortex tube. This thing was not pushed away from outflow, it moved from left to right under a bowl-shaped funnel cloud which would make it a landspout tornado. According to SPC reports a landspout was captured in Parwell TX, much further southwest from where I was but it meant storms that day were capable of producing landspouts.
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Reading The Sky - Dust Devil, Landspout, or Gustnado
