Gustnadoes can look similar to tornadoes, but they are not the same. AccuWeather's Geoff Cornish explains the differences.

A weather event in southeast Massachusetts resulted in wind damage, including downed trees and wires, which the National Weather Service determined was caused by a gustnado. Unlike tornadoes, which form from rotating updrafts originating in the clouds and extending downward, gustnadoes are surface-based phenomena that develop near the ground, often along gust fronts or cold fronts during thunderstorms.

Radar showed a line of thunderstorms and a cold front moving through the area before the event. The gustnado was produced by surface-level convergence and rotation, rather than the cloud-based rotation typical of tornadoes, and did not necessarily extend up to the cloud base.

What is a 'gustnado' and how is it different from a tornado?

I'm going to jump into a close-in view here. I'm going to zoom out a little bit so you get some perspective. This is southeast Massachusetts. Here we have Rhode Island, eastern Connecticut, Cape Cod's up here, Boston just off to the north. And there was some wind damage tied to what is believed to have been a gustnado. We're going to talk about what a gustnado is in southeast Massachusetts. You can see a 1047 last night, tree down. And at the same exact time, 1047, trees and wires down. The weather service in Boston investigated the damage and they believe this was caused by a gustnado, which is kind of associated with a tornado, but it really isn't the same exact thing. Let's take a look at radar here for this event. And again, this is a radar loop that takes us through 7 p.m. to midnight last night. And there was a time right before 11 p.m. when this band of thunderstorms rolled through a line of thunderstorms east of the area of Rhode Island and into far southern Massachusetts right there. When this front, there was a cold front tied to this, produced something that kind of resembled a tornado, but it technically wasn't your traditional tornado, it was a gustnado. So tornadoes are formed through an environment where there's a rotating updraft and they generally form from the top down, where the circulation originates in the cloud, the base of the clouds, and it extends down to the surface. With a gustnado, it's kind of the opposite. You typically have forcing near the surface, near the ground, that can lead to some convergence and some rotation and circulation, so it's surface-based and it doesn't always extend all the way up to the clouds. So in this case, we talk about gust fronts, that really chilly push of cooler air, rain-cooled air when there's a thunderstorm approaching. In this case, it may have been a true cold front that actually led to this zone of convergence and ultimately a little bit of a spin-up.

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