ABSTRACT Whirlwinds were photographically captured in Stok, Choglamsar, and Nubra valleys in Ladakh, India, in June 2018. It is estimated that the spatial extent of these whirlwinds was ~50 m 2 , vertical extent ~0.5–1 km, and lasted for ~15 min. To assess the meteorological setup that could have contributed to the occurrence of the whirlwinds, Advanced Research Weather Research and Forecasting (ARW) model (v4.3) was run in a three nested domain setup with 3 km, 1 km, and 333 m resolution. The model could simulate the whirlwinds at finer grid spacing (~333 m). The whirlwinds are formed in a strongly sheared environment of ~22 m s −1 , and the storm‐relative shear direction is ~80°. These events appear to be initiated as feedback of localized heterogeneity in a convective setting with increased winds and directional change with height. The surface wind convergence due to the temperature gradient at the surface also contributes to whirlwind initiation. The temperature gradient aligns with recently developed landscape heterogeneity and could be due to increasing urbanization. This study reports on the first evidence of whirlwinds in the Himalayan region and demonstrates the ability of the ARW model in representing/simulating whirlwinds in the complex orography of the Himalayan region.
Dimri et al. (2026) studied this question.