WATCH: Waterspout On Popular Northern Minnesota Lake

While there wasn't any severe weather outbreak in Minnesota over the holiday weekend, an unsettled atmosphere spun up some funnel clouds across Minnesota on Sunday, including a waterspout on a popular Northern Minnesota lake.

Small, pop-up showers and thunderstorms generated a handful of "fair weather funnel clouds" across the region to end the holiday weekend, like the one spotted by many on Lake Vermilion on Sunday afternoon that developed into a waterspout.

The Duluth office of the National Weather Service called this a "well-documented" waterspout that they not only saw on radar starting around 2:17 pm, but also got a lot of photos and videos from people on the lake as well.

In a social media post, the NWS shared a preliminary track of the waterspout. showing it touching down just north of Echo Point and heading north-northeast just past Spider Island before lifting back up off the lake.

One of the videos from Michelle Claviter-Tveit shows the well-defined waterspout lurking behind a bank of trees from her vantage point looking toward Big Bay on the lake.

Katie Higgins got a much clearer look at the waterspout from her porch, sharing the video on X as it spun across the lake.

National Weather Service's statistics on this waterspout

Based on photos, videos, and radar data, the National Weather Service offered an initial assessment of the waterspout, calling it an EF0 on the tornadic scale, which is the lowest on the scale.

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They estimate the peak wind speeds of the waterspout to be 65 mph, with its path across the lake being 1.95 miles and the width of the waterspout to be about 30 yards.

The NWS assessment no damage reports had been received as of their initial assessment.

READ MORE: These Minnesota towns get the least accurate weather forecasts in the state

As I mentioned earlier, this is being referred to as a "fair weather waterspout", even though it was associated with a stormcloud.

What's the difference between a "fair weather" and "tornadic" waterspout?

Waterspouts come in two different forms: Tornadic and fair weather. Tornadic waterspouts are, as the name would suggest, tornadoes on water. They form from the cloud base downward from a severe thunderstorm and tend to be more aggressive than fair-weather waterspouts.

Fair weather waterspouts, on the other hand, are generally slower moving, weaker, and form during non-severe weather conditions, like what happened on Sunday. Relatively light, circulating wind conditions can spin up one of these fair-weather waterspouts.

While they are weaker and less aggressive than a tornadic waterspout, they can still cause some damage if they come into contact with a watercraft, boat lift, etc. While not as severe as what you might think of with a tornado, circulating 65 mph winds can still pack a bit of a punch.