World "Weather Porn" Stormy Images Emerge Again

A wicked looking storm in Iowa on Sunday.  

Just because it's fun, and there have been plenty of nasty storms worldwide in the past few days, I'll give you a bit of weather porn, as I do occasionally.

Don't worry, for the uninitiated, weather porn is safe for work. It's just images of dramatic or bad storms that's all.

I don't have any photos of the surprise tornado in Worcester,  Massachusetts last evening, so we'll make do with other storms. (Residents had received a tornado warning, but earlier in the day, it seemed doubtful any storms would become that severe in New England)

Click on any of the photos in this post to make them bigger and easier to see.

Lightning lights up an Italian supercell storm.
Photo by Gianluca Prioli.  

The first image in this post, by @NPZChasers, via Twitter, shows a shelf cloud ahead of a severe thunderstorm in Iowa yesterday.  

It looks like a giant whale about to eat the landscape.  No whales actually ate anything in Iowa that I know of, but there were widespread reports of damage in the storms.

The second photograph is an incredible nighttime shot of a supercell thunderstorm at night, lit up by lightning. The photo was taken by Gianluca Prioli in Gabicce Mare, Romagna, Italy.

In this photo from Italy, note the wall cloud (the dark cloud at the bottom of the storm that looks sort of like a fedora.) Wall clouds often, but don't always produce tornadoes. No word on whether a tornado touched down in this storm.  

Lightning in Croatia. Photo by Ivan Rajcic. Add caption

The third image is by Ivan Rajcic, who left his camera lens open as an intense thunderstorm passed through part of Croatia. There was just an incredible amount of lightning with this storm.

Very pretty shot, though, considering the danger involved.