Lynn Lau
Northern News Services

Inuvik (Nov 04/02) - Ruby and Buster McLeod were sitting at their living room window Oct. 25, when they saw a strange sight -- what appeared to be a funnel cloud off in the northwestern sky.

"It sure was exciting because I never saw anything like that," says Ruby. "It was just like kind of red in the bottom, from the sun, and it was going higher and higher."

Buster phoned his daughter and the band office to tell them about it as he watched the cloud rise. "If it was fire, it would have been puffs of smoke," Buster says. "It was straight. Later it started tilting over."

At about 9 a.m., the cloud had drifted west and appeared to be hanging over the dump.

At Environment Canada's Arctic Weather Centre in Edmonton, meteorologists Yvonne Bilan-Wallace and Serge Besner puzzled over photos of the cloud.

After consulting weather information for that day, they decided the cloud probably was a plume of smoke that had been distorted by an inversion, when the air at ground level is colder than that above.

The tilt to the cloud could be explained by the winds in the upper atmosphere which were recorded by the morning weather balloon that day.

If the formation had been a funnel cloud -- very unlikely in these parts -- it would have extended from the bottom of a thunder cloud, Besner says.