A waterspout twisted over the surface of Lake Okeechobee late Friday afternoon, spotted from the lakeside condos in Pahokee by a resident named Maria Mills, who caught the whole thing on video at 5:25 pm. It’s the kind of sight that draws stares along Palm Beach County’s rural lake shore, where the water stretches wide enough to spin up its own weather.
Mills’s footage made its way to the National Weather Service’s Miami-South Florida office, which posted a thank-you to a user identified as James on Saturday for helping relay the video, according to a post from NWS Miami. The office, which goes by the handle @NWSMiami and describes itself as the official account for the National Weather Service Miami-South Florida, is based in Miami, Florida, but keeps watch over Lake Okeechobee and the surrounding waters as part of its forecast territory.
That kind of crowdsourcing is routine for the office. NWS Miami is co-located with the National Hurricane Center at Florida International University and maintains round-the-clock surveillance over six South Florida counties and adjacent waters, including the lake, relying heavily on trained spotters and public social media reports to confirm storms that radar alone might miss.
A Lake Built for Spinning Weather
Lake Okeechobee covers roughly 730 square miles but averages just nine feet deep, making it the largest freshwater lake in Florida and the second-largest natural freshwater lake entirely within the contiguous United States, according to the South Florida Water Management District. That combination of vast open surface and shallow water helps generate localized atmospheric collisions similar to the sea-breeze fronts that spin up waterspouts along Florida’s coasts…