Waterspouts off the British Isles

Abstract

WATERSPOUTS are not such rare phenomena in the seas around the British Isles as is sometimes supposed. Many of those that have been observed from coast stations of the Meteorological Office far out at sea at times when few people are in the neighbourhood have doubtless been recorded only at the Meteorological Office. This applies especially to those seen in waters off the main shipping routes. - With the rapid increase of continental air services and the B.A.F. expansion, opportunities of observation have multiplied, and statisticians of the future may have to be on their guard against accepting as real any sudden apparent increase of waterspout activity that may be shown during the re-armament period. Apart from this·, there has been the slower growth of seaside population in the last thirty or forty years. The four waterspouts seen off the sea-front at Bexhill on September 1 would almost certainly have been unrecorded had they occurred before that period, although some farm labourer might have returned to his native village after his day's work in the fields overlooking the sea to recount over his pint of beer how he had seen the Devil in the form of a four-trunked elephant leaning out of a thundercloud to drink out of the sea and how the Foul Fiend's breath had hung like a cloud over the surface of the sea as he drank. Those readers who wish to know more about the phenomenon can consult a work by Alfred Wegener called “Wind und Wasserhosen in Europa”(Braunschweig, 1917), or an account of a discussion by the late M. A. Giblett of a paper by the same author in the official Meteorological Magazine for April 1929. The waterspout is a well-known manifestation of the tornado, and is replaced by a 'dust devil' if the tornado passes from the water to a dusty land surface.