Oklahoma City native David Evans has been a pilot for about 30 years, but few things compare with what he encountered while flying his glider Sunday. Evans came face to face with a bona fide tornado — and decided to hitch a ride on the upward-moving air around it. Weather wasn’t conducive for strong thunderstorm activity or tornadoes in the Sooner State on Sunday, but Evans found a landspout, a borderline tornado that forms in a way similar to many waterspouts or dust devils. That meant it wasn’t born from a thunderstorm or cloud-based rotation, but rather developed from the ground up. It also couldn’t be spotted on radar, and there were no obvious large-scale weather features that would have clued meteorologists in to the chance for tornadoes. How do tornadoes form? This drone-based project seeks to unravel the secrets of spinning storms. “Realistically, it was more of a landspout, but we sort of have no justification as to why it occurred,” said Ryan Bunker, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Norman, Okla. “We didn’t have any answers.” Source: ‚David Evans/ Washinghton Post‘.