ST. PETE BEACH, Fla. — A mostly sunny afternoon at the beach Sunday suddenly turned ominous as thunderstorms popped up over the coastline and dropped at least one waterspout that was caught on camera.
10 Tampa Bay anchor Carolina Leid came close to the waterspout around 5 p.m. at the coast in St. Pete Beach. A video shows the funnel appearing to hang low from a cloud.
If contact were made with the water's surface, which is hard to tell from the video alone, the feature is considered a waterspout — the National Weather Service confirmed it as such at 5:15 p.m. At the very least, the storm produced a well-defined funnel cloud.
Weather service meteorologists issued a marine warning at 4:52 p.m., warning of strong wind gusts across portions of Tampa Bay and into the Gulf of Mexico off the coastline of Manatee and Pinellas counties. A sea breeze collided with the outflow from earlier storms, which produced the strong storms closer to the area's beaches.
The weather service later warned of waterspouts once the threat was more apparent.
Ty Carver tweeted another view of the waterspout from his vantage point from the St. Pete Pier near the downtown area. It was seen all the way across Pinellas County.
The National Weather Service office in Ruskin shared another video of a funnel cloud — this time in Tarpon Springs — Sunday evening.
The atmosphere Monday afternoon and evening largely is a repeat from Sunday, with the potential for showers and storms to pop up and push inland. Funnel clouds and waterspouts are possible whether sea breezes and outflow winds from other storms collide.