The National Weather Service in Grand Forks has released a special weather statement about the “Cold Funnel clouds” seen in the Red River Valley.
Stating; “Conditions are favorable for funnel clouds across southeastern North Dakota and lakes country in Minnesota. These types of funnel clouds are usually short lived and weak, and will not touch the ground or cause damage.”
Weatherology meteorologist Ray Miller said, “There’s a lot of wind shear in the atmosphere, we have this low-pressure center that really is just kind of centered right over the Fargo and Grand Forks area. It’s a fairly strong area of low pressure and there’s a lot of wind shear, the wind is changing direction very quickly as you go up in the atmosphere. When that happens, it doesn’t take a very strong thunderstorm to produce a funnel cloud. It happens a lot of times when we have fairly cool temperatures, a decent amount of moisture right near the surface. They’re called cold air funnels because they tend to happen when we’re in the cold pool behind a cold front such as the one that swept through overnight and into this morning. These are very very weak; they almost never touch the ground and when they do they very rarely do any damage. Occasionally you can get one that’ll produce winds up to 60 or perhaps 65 miles an hour, very rarely you’ll get one that’ll produce very low-end EF 0 tornado damage if it happens to hit something.”