PALM BEACH, Fla. – Video captured by the Palm Beach Police Department showed twin waterspouts swirling off the Florida coast on Thursday.
“Sometimes we are fortunate enough to see interesting weather from a safe distance,” the police department wrote in a Facebook post.
RELATED | ‘It was very scary’: Video shows tornado lift truck, send it flying across Jacksonville road
The video shows the waterspouts close together as a third and possible fourth funnel begins to form.
According to the National Weather Service, waterspouts are similar to tornadoes over water. Waterspouts are generally broken into two categories: fair weather waterspouts and tornadic waterspouts.
Tornadic waterspouts are simply tornadoes that form over water, or move from land to water. They have the same characteristics as a land tornado. They are associated with severe thunderstorms, and are often accompanied by high winds and seas, large hail, and frequent dangerous lightning.
Fair Weather waterspouts, which appears to be what formed on Thursday, are usually a less dangerous phenomena, but common over South Florida’s coastal waters from late spring to early fall.
Earlier in the week, ideos posted by a pilot at the Sanford airport show a waterspout touching down in the area, WESH reported.