Coalnado? Towering, dark-colored dust devil caught on camera

By Mark Puleo, AccuWeather staff writer

Some residents of Elkhorn, West Virginia, looked outside their windows and saw an unfamiliar sight on Monday afternoon: a dust devil hovering over a surface mine and kicking up a vortex of coal. Filmed by Randy Walters, an employee at a local coal mine, the whirlwind was promptly nicknamed a 'coalnado.'

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According to Walters, the whirlwind spun over a coal stockpile that had been cleaned up and loaded away.

"Vortices most often occur in warm, dry weather and are caused by stark differences between the warm surface of the Earth and colder air above," said AccuWeather Meteorologist and Social Media Manager Jesse Ferrell. "The twisting columns of air can be amplified by many different materials. The most common instance is with dust, hence the name dust devil. Other common materials include dirt on baseball fields and hay in fields or leaves."

In the case of this coalnado, the black coal likely helped the vortex get going due to the heat it absorbed on the ground.

Walters said he has seen dust devils “pretty regularly,” but they are usually around 2 or 3 feet tall, according to the Storyful News Agency.

“It was very loud,” Walters said. “I heard it before I saw it.”