A friend of mine called me up from Sumner County Monday night to tell me a funnel cloud had been reported over the police scanner.
That surprised me, because I had not seen or heard anything that suggested the storms moving through the region had the potential to produce tornadoes.
She told me she was driving in the same area the funnel was reported and took a photo of the feature. It didn’t look like a funnel to me, but to confirm my suspicions I relayed the photo to Dick Elder, meteorologist-in-charge at the Wichita branch of the National Weather Service.
His verdict: Not a funnel.
Rather, it was a phenomenon known in meteorology circles as an SLC: a Scary Looking Cloud. Harmless, but unsettling to the untrained eye.
Here’s the photo in question. One tip-off to its identity is its shape, Elder said. Because funnels are rotating rapidly, they have smooth edges. The jagged edges of this cloud, along with the absence of a supercell thunderstorm structure, are a telltale sign that this is not a developing tornado.
Monday night in Sumner County