Anchorage Daily News

Dorothy Ivanoff had just lifted off from the Eskimo village of Koyuk in a small plane Saturday when the pilot spotted a weather phenomenon that's common in the Florida Keys but nearly unheard of in Alaska.

It's called a waterspout and it looks like a mini-tornado above the waves.

The wind rattled the Cessna Caravan as Ivanoff reached for the video camera she uses to shoot clips of her kids. She aimed it at Norton Sound as a spinning column of water and wind -- reaching from the sea to the clouds -- slowly swung into view.

"It was moving across the water so quickly, and as we got closer we could just feel this rain hit really hard on the plane," said Ivanoff, a secretary for the Bering Strait School District in Unalakleet.

Now her clip is making waves on YouTube and Alaskans have rare video evidence of the funnel-shaped vortex appearing over the frigid Bering Sea.

Waterspouts are relatively common to see in warmer climates like that of the Southeastern United States, said Nathan Hardin, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Anchorage.

But sightings in Alaska are so unusual that a senior forecaster at the Anchorage Weather Service office hasn't heard of a legitimate waterspout report in 14 years on the job, Hardin said.

Ivanoff, who grew up in Golovin, a village 70 miles east of Nome, never saw one before Saturday.

She was flying at about 1,000 feet when she shot the video, she said. "We were getting close and the plane was just kind of bumping around from all that wind."

The science behind the phenomenon is complicated. "You have a boundary of cold and warm air close together," Hardin said. "When an updraft associated with a shower or thunderstorm moves over the boundary, it can cause a waterspout."

But in the Bering Sea the air is uniformly cool, Hardin said, which could explain why sightings are so infrequent.

Still, there are stories of spout sightings across Alaska.

Shari Miethe, of Wrangell, was riding in a plane in Southeast in 1976 when a waterspout blew the doors open, Miethe wrote in an e-mail Wednesday.

"(The pilot) was very levelheaded and reached over, pulled mine closed then his, descended further, expertly avoiding the growing field of spouts and got us next to the dock," she wrote.

Donald Coleman and his wife saw a series of what looked to be waterspouts less than a mile from the Whittier harbor in 2007, he wrote. "We observed watercraft, fishing boats etc., maneuver away from the spouts so I am sure, while rare, this is not a totally unknown occurrence in Alaska."

Waterspouts are bad news for mariners and planes but fall apart when they hit land. They're often confused with other weather phenomena, said Hardin, who confirmed what Ivanoff saw was indeed a waterspout.

Ivanoff had just enough juice to get a close-up, she said.

"Right toward the end, my camera just died. I forgot to recharge my battery that night."

Read The Village, the ADN's blog about rural Alaska, at adn.com/thevillage. Twitter updates: twitter.com/adnvillage. Call Kyle Hopkins at 257-4334.

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