A rotating mass of winds resembling an elephant trunk swept a pocket of West Medinipur on Wednesday.
The storm struck a few villages in Narayangarh block, around 140km from Kolkata, a little after 12 noon. The winds damaged trees and some houses. There was no report of any human casualty.
Videos of the mass of rotating winds became viral on social media. A Met official in Alipore, who saw the video, said the storm looked like a landspout. “Landspouts sometimes take place in the periphery of a strong weather system.”
A depression on Bay of Bengal entered land through the Odisha coast a couple of days ago. After landfall, it kept moving through Odisha and Chhattisgarh. The system triggered a wet spell across south Bengal and Odisha.
“A landspout is a tornado with a narrow, rope-like condensation funnel that forms while the thunderstorm cloud is still growing and there is no rotating updraft — the spinning motion originates near the ground,” says the website of the US-based National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
On June 10, a cylindrical column of wind that seemed to connect dark clouds in the sky and the Hooghly off Sagar islands in South 24-Parganas triggered panic among local residents.
The Met office had called it a waterspout, a whirling column of air and water mist.
New system
A fresh cyclonic circulation formed on east-central Bay of Bengal on Thursday. “The system is positioned off the Myanmar coast. It is not yet clear if it will intensify,” said a Met official.
If the system is headed towards the Bengal coast, then south Bengal, including Calcutta, would be under the grip of another wet spell from Sunday, he added.
