Jesse Watson captured this perfectly-timed footage of a massive dust cloud roiling across the Arizona desert at sunset. Read the rest
Watch a massive haboob engulf southern Arizona towns
Can't a naked man paddle his kayak during a typhoon in peace?
That'd be a no. Read the rest
Welsh heat wave reveals ancient ruins under farm fields
The UK's Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales has published some recent aerial shots of cropmarks, ancient ruins now covered by farm fields. Unusually dry weather conditions have created a golden opportunity to see these sites from the air. Read the rest
Guy captures the moment a river cuts a new channel to the ocean
Wayne Easton braved the elements to capture an interesting natural phenomenon: the Mahlongwa River in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa breaching its bank and cutting a channel to the Indian Ocean. Part two is below: Read the rest
Octopuses, starfish, and prawns rain down on Chinese city
A mass of sea creatures rained down on the Chinese city of Qingda during a storm last week. From Mysterious Universe:
The phenomenon of “fish rain” or “animal rain” is a rare, but very real, weather phenomenon which has been documented for centuries. Reports of thousands of falling fish, frogs, and other animals that have no business in the sky have occurred since the Roman empire...
While waterspouts are widely believed to be responsible for the phenomenon, the process of waterspouts sucking animals out of the sea has never been directly observed. This explanation certainly makes sense for Qingdao, China. It’s a coastal city, and this fish rain was accompanied by a large and powerful storm system.
Read the rest我们这里的天气也是非常强了……人家下雨下冰雹，我们这里下海鲜…… pic.twitter.com/cmzcovduEU
— YM (@nSZCVBtp33s2tyR) June 13, 2018
Hurricane Aletta: 2018's first major Pacific storm already Category 4, no threat to land... yet
Hurricane season is on. Hurricane Aletta is now a Category 4 storm, and is the first major hurricane of the 2018 Eastern Pacific hurricane season. A second, as-yet-unnamed and still-forming storm is right behind it. That storm could become the year's second named hurricane within the next few days. Read the rest
Spectacular slow-motion footage of lightning strikes
In Transient: Extended and Unused Footage, Dustin Farrell shares some of the great shots of weather events that got trimmed or omitted from his beautiful film Transient. Read the rest
Weatherman angry that no-one appreciates being told about forthcoming Michigan weather
Some folks have a tough lot in life than this, but today let's offer a little sympathy for the bitter comfort of a man whose job it is to inform people what the weather's going to be like in Michigan. Think Sisyphus, but with a giant yellow snowball that keeps melting and refreezing in April. Read the rest
Freaky orange snow falls on parts of Eastern Europe
Pats of Russia, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Romania, and Moldova was covered with orange snow this weekend. The odd hue was caused by sand blown into the atmosphere from the Sahara Desert that mixed with snow and rain. The same Saharan dust also resulted in a very orange tint to the Greek island of Crete, seen below.
"African Dust Turns Snow Orange in Eastern Europe" (Weather.com)
Heraklion, Crete in thick Saharan dust right now! Report: Ποπη Κοκοσαλακη pic.twitter.com/4m3ZVY6jap
— severe-weather.EU (@severeweatherEU) March 22, 2018
Drone footage of Ohio River flooding
Waters along the Ohio River are at record levels, reports USA Today. Read the rest
Watch this astounding video of lightning bolts in ultra-high definition at 1,000 frames-per-second
Filmmaker Dustin Farrell spent his summer traveling 20,000 miles to film lightning around the United States. He used a Phantom Flex4K camera to capture these brilliant bolts at 1,000 frames per second. The film is called "Transient."
“Lightning is like a snowflake. Every bolt is different,” Farrell says. “I learned that lightning varies greatly in speed. There are some incredible looking bolts that I captured that didn’t make the cut because even at 1000fps they only lasted for one frame during playback. I also captured some lightning that appear computer generated it lasted so long on the screen.”
(via The Kid Should See This)
NASA simulation of this year's hurricane season
NASA published an animation depicting this years' rough hurricane season in two smooth minutes. It's beautifully wispy and liquid, a fascinating contrast to the radar machine-vision we usually get of weather patterns. From the press release:
Read the restHow can you see the atmosphere? By tracking what is carried on the wind. Tiny aerosol particles such as smoke, dust, and sea salt are tranpsorted across the globe, making visible weather patterns and other normally invisible physical processes.
This visualization uses data from NASA satellites, combined with mathematical models in a computer simulation allow scientists to study the physical processes in our atmosphere. By following the sea salt that is evaporated from the ocean, you can see the storms of the 2017 hurricane season.
During the same time, large fires in the Pacific Northwest released smoke into the atmosphere. Large weather patterns can transport these particles long distances: in early September, you can see a line of smoke from Oregon and Washington, down the Great Plains, through the South, and across the Atlantic to England.
Dust from the Sahara is also caught in storms sytems and moved from Africa to the Americas. Unlike the sea salt, however, the dust is removed from the center of the storm. The dust particles are absorbed by cloud droplets and then washed out as it rains.
Advances in computing speed allow scientists to include more details of these physical processes in their simulations of how the aerosols interact with the storm systems.
Ship exhaust makes ocean lightning more common and intense in shipping lanes
The American Geophysical Union reports that a long-term study of major shipping lanes indicates that ship exhaust is dramatically altering lightning patterns. It's not clear what the long-term effects might be. Read the rest
Remarkable timelapse of a cargo ship at sea
JeffHK mounted a camera on a cargo ship, and 80,000 photos later he had a fascinating timelapse of what it's like to be at sea for 30 days. Read the rest
Harvey hits hard, TX governor issues mandatory evacuations as 'catastrophic flood' risks loom
Governor Greg Abbott of Texas just gave an update on the impact of Harvey, formerly a category 4 hurricane, and now a tropical storm that made landfall near Corpus Christi late Friday night. There are no confirmed storm fatalities yet. At this time, 338,000 power outages are reported across the state. The governor is issuing a mandatory evacuation order for central parts of Texas. Read the rest
Hurricane Harvey could be strongest storm to hit U.S. in over a decade, and a first for Trump's FEMA
#HurricaneHarvey could hit landfall late Friday night along the Texas coast as a Category 3 hurricane. Read the rest
See this incredible full circle rainbow
Someone on a crane captured this stunning video of a full circle rainbow. Unfortunately most of us never get a chance to see circle rainbows because the ground interrupts. Here's an explanation from Phil "Bad Astronomy" Plait in Slate:
...To see a rainbow, you face away from the Sun (180°), then look about 42° away from that point (180°–138°). The drops in an arc along that angle will then bend the light back toward you, and you get a rainbow, with the colors spread out a bit because they bend by different amounts.
Oh, wait. Did I say “arc”? Because technically, any raindrop 42° away from the anti-solar point (ooh, fancy science-speak again) will bend the light back to you. We see rainbows in the sky because in general the ground is close to you. When we look up toward the sky we see for a long way, and there are lots of raindrops along your eyeline that can add their light together to make the rainbow. When you look down, the ground gets in the way, there aren’t as many drops, and you don’t see a rainbow.
(via DIGG)
(image above via WoahDude) Read the rest
