Wyoming sheriff captures dramatic landspout as severe storms move through state

A local sheriff’s camera caught a landspout twisting through Wyoming skies as storms rolled across the state, a vivid example of how quickly a routine-looking thunderstorm can turn dangerous. The video showed the funnel spinning beneath towering clouds, underscoring a storm threat that the National Weather Service says is easy to underestimate.

The weather service defines a landspout as a tornado that does not come from organized storm-scale rotation and is not tied to a wall cloud or mesocyclone. Instead, it often forms beneath towering cumulus clouds and is considered the land-based equivalent of a waterspout. Even though landspouts often look weaker than classic supercell tornadoes, the National Weather Service says they can still produce EF-2 or EF-3 damage.

Wyoming is one of the places where landspouts are most common, along with eastern Colorado and New Mexico, largely because cloud bases are often high in that region. That geography has made the state a frequent setting for these short-lived but potentially violent tornadoes, and the Cheyenne forecast office has documented them before. A May 24, 2023 Cheyenne page detailed a landspout in the city, and a public information statement later said tornadoes near Pine Bluffs, Wyoming, were verified to be landspouts.

The latest footage arrived as the NOAA National Weather Service Cheyenne office warned on June 21 that widely scattered strong to severe thunderstorms were possible again on Monday, June 22, with large hail and strong winds listed as the main hazards. That forecast framed the landspout not as an isolated spectacle, but as part of a broader severe-weather pattern moving through the state.

For residents, the lesson is simple: a landspout may not always look like the textbook tornado seen on television, but it is still a tornado. In a state where these events recur, the difference between a dramatic sky shot and a dangerous storm can be only a few minutes.