'Dust devil' winds through Moncton's Centennial Park
Dust devils can form on flat land when days are warm with no wind and low humidity says Jim Abraham
What looked to many visitors to Moncton's Centennial Park on Sunday afternoon like a tornado was almost certainly a dust devil, according to CBC meteorologist Jim Abraham.
"They can be rather intense and rather intimidating looking but they're very localized and they form in conditions exactly that happened [Sunday] in Moncton," he said during an interview Monday on Information Morning Moncton.
"I'll almost guarantee it was a dust devil."
Sandra Foster was at Centennial Park on Sunday afternoon feeding the ducks with her two daughters when she saw the unusual wind funnel form.
"Sand started picking up and swirling into the air and it kept going a little bit higher and higher and then all of the sudden it just … ran down the hill, hit the water and it went up about 12-feet high at least of water and big waves," she said.
Honest to good God ... I've never in my life seen anything hit water and go like that.- Sandra Foster
"You could have surfed in it — it was unbelievable."
Foster watched the funnel travel into the parking lot and says other witnesses told her it dissipated when it hit a building.
"I'm 48 and I've never seen anything like that before," she said.
Abraham says dust devils can form quickly if conditions are just right, as they were in Moncton on Sunday.
The temperature was 17 C with light winds at about four kilometres per hour and very low humidity of about 30 per cent.
"So you get a lot of heat in the low levels of the atmosphere because the sun is quite strong," he said.
"With the calm winds you get these eddies forming as the heat rises from the ground and indeed, because it's been rather dry, you end up getting a perfect situation for that heat over grass areas and over ball fields and the like to form dust devils."
Foster said when the dust devil hit the water she and her daughters were immediately drenched.
"Honest to good God... I've never in my life seen anything hit water and go like that," she said.
Abraham has seen dust devils that have been strong enough to lift children off the ground.
"It's enough to knock somebody over — the strongest ones," he said.