A landspout is a slang-term coined by meteorologist Howard B. Bluestein in the early 1980s for a kind of
tornado not associated with the
mesocyclone of a
thunderstorm. The Glossary of Meteorology defines a a landspout as "Colloquial expression describing tornadoes occurring with a parent cloud in its growth stage and with its vorticity originating in the boundary layer.The parent cloud does not contain a preexisting midlevel mesocyclone. The landspout was so named because it looks like a weak
Florida Keys waterspout over land. See nonsupercell tornado."
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