Hawaii saw a rare tornado warning on Friday
The alert was only the sixth tornado warning issued in Hawaii since the 1980s
An unusually strong thunderstorm prompted an equally unusual tornado warning in Hawaii on Friday morning.
Clusters of showers and thunderstorms produced heavy rain and gusty winds across the Hawaiian Islands to end the week.
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But one storm caused concern among meteorologists as it made landfall on Niihau during the pre-dawn hours Friday.
According to the National Weather Service office in Honolulu, the storm began rotating “in part by strong wind shear and an interaction with an outflow boundary from previous convection.”
Boundaries can enhance the rotation within a thunderstorm and help to produce conditions favourable for tornadoes.
“The rotation was strong enough to have produced a tornado, but due to the location of the event, we will likely never know if one actually occurred,” the NWS said after the storm.
Serving as home to fewer than 100 residents, Niihau is the westernmost and least populous of Hawaii’s eight main islands.
Experts have confirmed 41 tornado touchdowns across the state since 1955, with the most recent documented tornado occurring west of Honolulu on April 23, 2015.
Hawaii's wet season usually runs from late autumn through early spring. March is Honolulu's wettest month of the year with an average of about 60 mm of rain.
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