I know this ain’t much more than an overgrown dust devil – but, that’s all any tornado is! It also ain’t especially supposed to be happening at this altitude – 6500 feet in NM.
This is looking Southwest from our orchard – towards Albuquerque. That’s Sandia Crest on the left. The tornado is 5 miles away in La Bajada, just below the southern half of the Caja del Rio mesa.
Pretty exciting for our neighborhood.
One of the neatest aspects of all this is that everyone has a digital camera, nowadays. Within an hour, the NEW MEXICAN newspaper had a half-dozen or more images online. I think the best was this one from Andy Wells.
Cool. I have experienced some of your dust devils, on my motorcycle rides through NM. Damn near ruined my day.
I was driving from Tampa to Orlando one afternoon on I-4 and drove through a dust devil. What a shock! It almost knocked my car off the road. I was lucky to keep it under control.
Repeating part of post in another article (apologies if you’ve already seen it):
….Texas Star Party held annually near McDonald Observatory. I’ll never forget the visit in 1984 when under clear skies a freak dust devil picked up some poor soul’s Celestron 14 (50 lbs.) and turned it into a mangled mess of aluminum and glass shards.
#2, Hop, you were lucky!!
Eideard, great photo, you’re having too much fun with that camera. 🙂
Watched the tornadic “hook” go by Cochiti/La Bajada on radar a while ago; The Weather Underground is a useful website. Your pic appeared shortly thereafter on this site. Here near downtown Albuquerque we had (and still have at 5:30 PM) a lot of thunder, but little rain.
I wish I had gotten a decent picture of the 2.5 mile wide tornado I chased here in Nebraska once. Stupid camera! 🙁
One of the few nice things about driving up through Nevada is all the dust devils you see. On the last trip I must have seen thirty in one hour. Must have been perfect conditions that day. It was really cool.
Looks like it could suck up a whole lake.
Poor little toto
All I want to is to go Aunt Bea
There is no place like home. There is no place like home.
Boy – that twister looks like it could swallow up a whole lake – fish , moose and all.
Scary stuff .
At least it wasn’t a Tasmanian Devil. As Bugs Bunny said, “I knew I shoulda taken that left turn at Alburquerque….”
I live in Las Cruces in southern NM, and we had similar funnel clouds about a month ago. According to the National Weather Service, these are “Land Spouts”, not Tornadoes. What’s the difference?? A Tornado descends from the clouds down, and a Land Spout ascends from the ground up.
#7 – that link reminds me of the internet from over 10 years ago – get a web designer pronot!!