WATCH: Tornado forms near Denver

(DENVER) — Colorado is fairly well known for its chaotic weather, and Tuesday, Aug. 13 proved to be no different. A landspout tornado was reported near the Denver metro area just before 3 p.m.

Although many might not realize it, portions of Colorado are often included in what some might consider “traditional” tornado alley.

The Eastern Plains of Colorado are a ripe hot spot for severe weather due to the abundance of active weather ingredients. Cold dry air wraps around the Rockies, while warm moist air is pumped into the region from the Gulf of Mexico.

The tornado that formed on Tuesday was spotted on the northwest side of the Denver metro, unusually close to the mountains. Typically, the tornadoes that Colorado gets are reported in the plains, east of DIA. That makes this landspout tornado (below) a bit of an oddity.

But what exactly is a landspout tornado, and how are they different from normal tornadoes?

There are generally two types of tornadoes: supercell and non-supercell. A supercell tornado forms from a rotating thunderstorm. As the thunderstorm rotates faster and faster, a wall cloud can form and then a funnel cloud. If conditions are just right, the funnel cloud will reach closer and closer to the ground completing the connection and officially making it a tornado.

A landspout tornado (a different example above) forms a bit differently. Instead of the circulation, or spin, occurring up in the thunderstorm – it happens at the ground. This spin can occur in a few different ways but one of the more common processes is boundary collisions. As winds meet from different directions, you can get a small pocket of spin to form at the surface. The Rocky Mountains are known to help this process out sometimes too.

Once the spin is present on the ground, a developing thunderstorm above may ‘stretch out’ the vortex and extend it into the sky. The updraft of the thunderstorm helps force the air upwards into the cloud base, completing the non-supercell tornado.

As far as the numbers go, when it comes to August, Colorado actually has one of the higher average occurences. The Storm Prediction Center has compiled tornado data from the last 30 years and reports that Colorado sees roughly 5 tornadoes every August. Florida sees about the same amount, and Minnesota usually sees the most for this time of year.

The severe threat is slowly starting to wind down for us here in Southern Colorado but always stay up to date on the forecast just in case a sneaky severe weather set up slips in.

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