A waterspout is an intense columnar vortex (usually appearing as a funnel-shaped cloud) that occurs over a body of water, connected to a cumuliform cloud. In the common form, it is a non-supercell tornado over water.
Liz Klimas reports for The Blaze, July 11, 2013:
Jesse Ferrell, AccuWeather.com meteorologist and social media coordinator, didn’t believe what he saw in Tampa Bay this week was real. The picture and video by Joey Mole in Safety Harbor show an unbelievable and surreal waterspout curving downward from a cloud into Old Tampa Bay. (What appears to be the sun in the bottom right of the picture is actually the flash from Mole’s iPhone reflecting in a window through which he snapped the image.)
“When I saw this photo this morning on social media, I couldn’t believe it was real,” Ferrell wrote on his blog. So Ferrell actually vetted the photo’s legitimacy because the image was so fantastic.
You can watch a video taken by Mole of the water spout (Warning: Strong language): http://bcove.me/nq6kgy9q
Here’s ABC Action News’ video about the waterspout:
Here’s a longer video showing the waterspout when it first formed:
Here’s another photo of the spout:
