Thanks Andy for writing this on your blog. Sorry for shortening it. Read the full article here.
The strange weather continues: after a week of rain off and on, Sonja spotted this small funnel cloud over Wailua on Saturday morning (March 3) around sunrise (7am):
With the backlight from the sunrise, you could see the hollow tube shape:
Here is a closeup of the funnel cloud, at its thickest:
I did some searching on the internet, and funnel clouds are fairly unusual in Hawaii.
The odd thing is that this happened the day after deadly tornadoes and storms hit the midwest United States, so we had storms and tornadoes on our minds. While we were fortunate to be spared such extreme weather, it was another rainy weekend with over 13 inches (330 mm) in one day at Hanalei (the bridge was closed again), and 17 inches (430 mm) at the summit of Wai’ale’ale. Here on the east side, we got over 9 inches (230 mm), and it’s again raining hard tonight.
