While summer brings the arrival of severe weather such as monsoon storms and towering dust clouds, another interesting weather phenomena occurred in Arizona this week.
In a recent video shared by 12 News viewer Bill Brannen, we see what appears to be a landspout tornado.
Shot near the Kingman Airport on July 27, the video shows a thin column of clouds moving through a neighborhood.
Brannen says he noticed strong cells moving into the Kingman area near his home so he watched the skies. Once he saw a funnel cloud forming, he grabbed his phone and started recording.
According to Dan Berc, warning coordination meteorologist for the National Weather Service, this footage appears to show a landspout tornado, which is the most common type of tornado in the southwest U.S.
These tornadoes can occur with strong thunderstorms that may not exhibit the traditional supercell characteristics, Berc said.
A difference between the more familiar tornadoes and the landspout tornado is that the rotation of landspout tornadoes originates in the air nearer the ground and moves upward, the opposite of supercell tornadoes.
Landspouts are also known to be weaker and shorter-lived than supercell tornadoes, but they can still cause significant damage, meteorologists say.
There have been no reports of damage from this reported tornado sighting.