[Ed.]

Who you gonna call!!!...mythbusters..? dear me, oops listening to 80s tunes atm on the box, couldn't help it.Anyway enough, enjoy the night-shows if you've got them, they're here you know

[John Mason]

Tim Prosser, on 11 August 2012 - 19:39, said:

LOL at Nigel. Exactly. The brown sludgy stuff in the pictures doesn't actually look like seaweed from a beach anyway. What species?

There will be very little seaweed on the mudflats of the Severn Estuary - more or less only what is washed up from elsewhere, which around the UK would be heavily biased towards egg wrack and bladder wrack, which that doesn't resemble.

As for falls of frogs etc, of course it is possible that such things could happen in conjunction with a tornado (assuming it sorted debris of similar density), but it is more likely that a large proportion of the reports are from when frogs come out after rain. I see a fall of frogs every time it rains here, but then our garden pond had well over 100 pairs in it in spring.

Re - the sentence I've highlighted: this is inaccurate. As a sea-angler, I regularly have to deal with weed loose in the water - it's a pain in the neck. What type you get depends on many factors and one obscure type can dominate on occasion. The last time I fished Borth, for example, on July 28th, a lot of filamentous green weed was washing ashore, each mass having a colony of buoy-barnacles at its heart. Then there are the red coralline weeds, the eel-grasses, the kelps - each can show in dominance on occasion depending on weather, currents, state of the tides and so on. Importantly, no beach is required for a tornado to loft weed fragments. From fishing reports I'm aware of, and some of the cursing therein, a waterspout in the Bristol Channel would be quite adequate.

However, the only way this is going to be solved is for someone to go and collect samples of this reported stuff and get it identified!

[StephenS]

Agreed, John, but there is no confirmed waterspout/tornado here. Our regional BBC forecaster Ian Fergusson was quoted in an earlier link in this thread surmising that a funnel cloud may have touched down in the Severn estuary, and was apparently keen to link this to the alleged fall of seaweed using the favoured (but as far as I know untested) tornado/waterspout hypothesis.


I've just reread the previous posts, and Jason appears (unless I'm missing something) to be linking to footage of an FC at Gloucester Point, Virginia, in 2011 - so not connected to this incident at all. Sorry, Jason, if I'm mistaken about this.

If I remember correctly, John, you rated the Bow Street tornado at T4/F2, so it's not surprising it was able to convey light debris a considerable distance. In this case, however, a tornado, if it existed at all, is likely to have been extremely weak and I doubt its ability to have done such a thing. And we're left with the problem, as in so many of these cases, that only a particular category of stuff appears to have been set down in a particular place.

Sorry, but I'm struggling to accept this.

[chrisips]

So a waterspout has the energy to suck gallons of water hundreds of feet up into the base of a storm, but doesn't have the power to lift seaweed floating on the surface of the water up into a storm, i just can't believe that.

[Bazmundo]

No, contrary to it's name a waterspout doesn't suck water up from the surface, notwithstanding some sea spray in the lowest half (in the same manner as a dust devil). The funnel seen reaching the water is condensed vapour in the same way as a landspout/tornado, AFAIK.

[skanky]

Bazmundo, on 12 August 2012 - 12:04, said:

...contrary to it's name...

Oh now, don't start that again!

This post has been edited by skanky: 12 August 2012 - 20:42

[Flatlander]

John Mason, on 12 August 2012 - 03:18, said:

Re - the sentence I've highlighted: this is inaccurate. As a sea-angler, I regularly have to deal with weed loose in the water - it's a pain in the neck. What type you get depends on many factors and one obscure type can dominate on occasion. The last time I fished Borth, for example, on July 28th, a lot of filamentous green weed was washing ashore, each mass having a colony of buoy-barnacles at its heart. Then there are the red coralline weeds, the eel-grasses, the kelps - each can show in dominance on occasion depending on weather, currents, state of the tides and so on. Importantly, no beach is required for a tornado to loft weed fragments. From fishing reports I'm aware of, and some of the cursing therein, a waterspout in the Bristol Channel would be quite adequate.

However, the only way this is going to be solved is for someone to go and collect samples of this reported stuff and get it identified!

Agree with your last point - though sadly that seems unlikely...

I can believe you get lots of floating weed in Borth (I remember a lot on Anglesey, and yes, it was a pain) but I would have thought there would be very little lying on the mudflats in an estuary since it doesn't grow there. On the Humber, for instance, you see very little, except what is stranded at spring tide lines. I admit you might get rafts floating up and down on the tide, and there is probably more on the W coast.

The thing is, surely (as Nigel said), you'd get lots of other debris or species, not just a brown sludge that appears in the pictures. Although it looks seaweed-ish, I'm not sure it resembles any actual species I've seen.

I'm not saying that it is impossible that there was a tornado, but I just don't think it is very likely, and there have been previous reports of 'seaweed' that turned out to be Nostoc.

http://www.seaweed.i...green_algae.php

[Bazmundo]

skanky, on 12 August 2012 - 20:42, said:

Oh now, don't start that again!

Oo-er, I wasn't starting that one! No no, rather busting the assumption that a lot of people take from the name. I remember watching a TV news report of multiple waterspouts somewhere in Australia. The reporter stated that they "reached as high as the cloud base". I'm more than happy for the slang to stick, but as long as people know it's not water 'spouting' upwards and that this kind of debris lofting and distributing is only really in strong tornadoes... over water.

[John Mason]

In the case of Bow Street, the tornado was on the ground for a mile and a half; light debris (fragments of corrugated plastic) occurred in a strewn-path as far as Talybont (3 miles) and the log-books were found up to 20 miles NE (Corris). Without Doppler radar it was not possible to establish the nature of the circulation within the cloud over this distance; however strong and not necessarily rotating updraughts could keep paper in circulation a lot longer after other debris had descended.

[Dave W]

Looks like bacteria Nostoc commune to me.. it was there but it developed due to the heavy rain .. just possible birds picked it up and dropped it over some cars etc as well.

[StephenS]

It's very reminiscent of accounts of 'star jelly' or pwdr sêr as it's called in Welsh, and it's unlikely that meteorites, tornadoes or cloudbursts are the explanation for this sort of slimy stuff. I remember we discussed a 'fall' of blue jelly-like spheres in a hailstorm in Bournemouth a year or so ago - these turned out after scientific analysis to be a polymer plant hydration gel.

Various possible culprits for star jelly, including nostoc cybanobacteria, are discussed here:

http://www.ispot.org.uk/node/101544


Edit: (Sorry, Tim ... I didn't follow your link until after I'd posted and now realise it covers much the same ground).

This post has been edited by StephenS: 14 August 2012 - 04:03