Huge water spout spotted over sea off the Isle of Wight

Watch video of the water spout captured by Daniel Skudder.

A huge water spout has been spotted over the Isle of Wight.

Amazed onlookers have been posting pictures and video when it appeared over the sea near Bembridge.

The Met Office has confirmed it is a water spout, which is described as a tornado occurring over a lake or sea.

The weather in southern England has been dominated by sunshine and showers over the past few days.

The Met Office says tornadoes are swirling columns of air, spinning rapidly with winds of over 40mph or 60kph.

The fastest wind speeds ever recorded for a tornado are over 300mph or 480kph and are the fastest winds ever recorded on Earth.

Tornadoes usually form from big thunderstorms called 'supercells', but can form from other types of storms too, like tropical cyclones.

When a thunderstorm is being fed lots of warm, moist air it continues to grow and can begin to rotate.

If this rotation begins to lower from the cloud a tornado is beginning to form, but at this stage we call it a funnel cloud.

When the funnel reaches the ground it becomes a tornado.

Tornadoes have lots of other names, like whirlwind, twister, or landspout, and are called waterspouts when they occur over lakes or the sea.

There are also phenomenon called dust devils or willy willys, that look like tornadoes, but are very different.

These are formed from the ground and don't lower down from cloud like tornadoes do, in fact they mostly form under clear blue skies.

Dust devils occur when the ground gets very hot, usually in deserts where the surfaces are sandy or dusty and dry, causing updraughts to form which lift the dust and sand into the air.

Unlike tornadoes, dust devils are very short lived and their winds are quite weak and are unlikely to do any damage.