It's Foliage Season In Vermont!

My idea of Vermont foliage season. A springtime view last
year in Franklin County. 

No, despite the headline in this post, I haven't gone off the deep end. I fully understand it's spring, not autumn.

But really, we've hit what I consider the nicer of the two foliage seasons in Vermont. The one where the landscape comes to life in an explosion of green and blooms. As in right now.

I say this every year in May, but I have no idea why the Vermont Department of Tourism and Marketing doesn't promote this time of year like they do the traditional fall foliage season.

True the Vermont tourism web page currently has a gorgeous spring view, but still.

Maybe it's just as well. I can enjoy the scenery without rubbing elbows with too many lost tourists.

Yes, fall foliage here is gorgeous, and perhaps a bit more multi-colored than the spring foliage. However, it's hardly monochromatic out there at the moment. There's every shade of green imaginable in the buds and new leaves, and it seems to change by the minute.

Yesterday was a great example. We had near summer-like warmth in the afternoon, and the woods responded. When I drove to work early Monday morning in the northern Champlain Valley, the landscape was mostly brown with splashes of green.

By the time I drove back home in the late afternoon, the landscape was green was spots of lingering early spring brown.

Plus it's fascinating in the spring to watch the green start on the ground, in the grass, in the lowest elevations, then climb into the trees, and then climb the slopes of the soon-to-be aptly named Green Mountains.

There's other wonderful colors, of course. Pops of white shadbush blooms are emerging in the forests. Patches of white and pink trillium are about to create throw rugs of blooms on patches of wet forest floors.

It was cool and damp most of this spring, and that was great for the forsythia and daffodils. These yellow blooms almost glow in the dark they're so brilliant. I don't know a friendlier face than a happy looking daffodil bobbing gently back and forth in the breeze. Soon, meadows will be polka dotted with thousands of dandelion blooms. Who can resist that?

And it keeps coming. Next up, pink and purple crabapple trees will pop out, and lilacs. Those glorious, aromatic lilacs.  It's impossible for me to walk down a street without sticking my face and nose into every lilac bloom I encounter on my trip.

Speaking of aromas, have you ever really smelled the air this time of year, especially on a rainy or humid evening? It's a gorgeous, rich organic smell, punctuated by the sweetness of blooming flowers.

The sounds you hear this time of year are about as pleasant as you can get, too. This time of year when I take the dogs outside at dawn, we're treated to the happy sound of robins greeting the morning, and the DEE-DEE of chickadees debating each other in opposing trees.

Like every season, spring in Vermont does have its drawbacks. The black flies swarming in your face are unpleasant to say the least. You also can't go hiking in the woods and mountains. It's too muddy and wet.

But we'll take it. Amid the bitter winds and deep snow of early March, when we've already endured winter for months, I often ask myself, "Why do I live in Vermont?"

I get my emphatic answer when I walk out the door into the explosively re-awakening new green landscape.

Glacier Collapse Sends Tourists Fleeing

A glacier collapses into water in Iceland recently, setting off a huge
wave that sent tourists scrambling for safety. Nobody was hurt. 

Tourists often go to Iceland to see the natural beauty of this Arctic, North Atlantic island. One of the draws are the beautiful glaciers which often calf off into the water.

One group of tourists recently almost got more than they bargained for. One spectacular thing to watch is when the end of a glacier breaks off and falls dramatically into the water. If you get too close, though, it can get dangerous.

Now, forgive me for giving you a salad of alphabetical letters here, but Icelandic locations are notoriously difficult to spell. The video you'll see below took place on March 31 in Jokulsarlon lagoon, part of the Breioamerkurjokull glacier.

Tourists watched as pieces of ice fell off the glacier. Then a big piece fell off, hitting the water and basically causing a localized tsunami.  Everybody had to run for their lives. Spoiler alert: Everybody got out of the way in time and nobody was hurt. The group of people had been previously briefed by tour guides on what to do if a wave approached.

By the way, this video isn't part of a climate change screed, though Iceland, like many parts of the Arctic are affected by global warming. The types of ice falls you'll see in the video are quite normal, with or without climate change.

The type of glacial calving, as it's called, is fairly common in Iceland this time of year, but the one in the video is larger and closer to shore than usual. I love the loud roar the event caused.

Here's the dramatic video:

"Superbloom" Dazzling California And Arizona; Stupid People Threaten To Ruin It

A view of this year's Super Bloom in California

A spectacular "super bloom" is engulfing desert areas of California and Arizona after a very wet winter re-energized plants in arid parts of the southwest.

Hillsides there are dazzling with acres and acres and acres of red poppies, along with lupine, phacelia, popcorn flower, lily, snapdragon and varieties of sunflower.

The result are hillsides so colorful that they - I hate to say it - are at least as stunningly gorgeous if not more so than the fall foliage that brings millions of tourists here to Vermont.   Even photos from space are capturing the gorgeous colors of this super bloom

Newsweek calls this "perfect storm" conditions for a super bloom, but of course storm is not what comes to mind when you see photos and videos of these flowers. But storms are why they are there.

In some spots, wildfire heat and smoke can prime the pump to germinate seeds. If it rains a lot in the months following these fires, ideal conditions develop for super blooms.

Which is happening this year.

Of course, everybody wants to see this super bloom, and that brings out the idiots.

The ecosystem in these super bloom sites is fragile, and visitors really must stay on marked trails or else they'll damage the plants and soil, forever wrecking future super blooms. But of course some people don't, because their own Instagram shots are far more important that the blooms, and the future enjoyment of other visitors.

Apparently, getting "likes" on Instagram is much more important than preserving parks for future super blooms.

So they lay down in the flowers for the glamour shot. And doing so means flowers won't grow back in that spot for ages. Thanks a lot, scummy "fashion models!"

In Lake Elsinore, California, officials had to close down access to Walker Canyon becaue the roads, including Interstate 15, got so clogged with visitors. Area officials started a shuttle service, costing $10 per person, to bring things down to a dull roar.

This recent satellite photo clearly shows the bright colors of
this year's super bloom in southern California.

Many of the visitors were also not prepared. These are hiking trails. Outdoors. In nature. And weather.

So people got stuck or mildly injured because they didn't bring decent hiking shoes, proper clothing and water. Plus, some were not in good enough physical shape to hike.

One particularly entitled pair decided to set a helicopter down this past Tuesday in the Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve, says the Los Angeles Times.

Obviously, there is no airport or landing pad in the reserve. As the Los Angeles Times reports:

"'We never thought it would be explicitly necessary to state that it is illegal to land a helicopter in the middle of the fields and begin hiking off trail in the Antelope Valley Poppy Reserve,' officials said in a Facebook post along with the hashtag #Don'tDoomTheBloom.

'We were wrong.'"

The pair fled in the helicopter when rangers began approaching to find out what the hell these two were thinking. Officials said they are still trying to identify the helicopter and its occupants.

I certainly can't blame people for wanting to see this spectacular show from nature. We all love to see things like this. Most people are pretty responsible about it, too. I just hope as soon as somebody sees some moron doing something damaging, they get called out.

A little bit of public shaming wouldn't hurt, either.

Here's a nice video tour around Lake Elsinore, California recently:



Once this video gets going after the preliminaries, the views are spectacular:

Spring Springs In Vermont; Some Flooding Risk, But So Far, Nothing Extreme

A muddy path through the snow in my St. Albans, Vermont
yard this morning. Hoping the warm temperatures over the
next couple of days gets rid of the snow, and we
could then move on into spring from there. 

It was blessedly warmish in Vermont this morning.  Not warm, not balmy, but we'll take anything we can get.

I'm sticking by my prediction of no subzero readings again in Vermont until next November at the earliest. Yesterday at 6 a.m. it was 9 below in Island Pond. At the same time this morning, Island Pond was 21 degrees above zero.

Not exactly toasty but, ahhhhhhhh.

You will now see signs of spring coming pretty fast and furious. Vermont style spring. You know, mud, impassable dirt roads, scattered flooding, that kind of pleasant stuff.

Also, nicer stuff. People in the warmer valleys will start to see the first hints of crocus or daffodil shoots coming up in warm, protected corners in the next couple of days. Already, morning bird song sounds like spring. Red wing blackbirds are all over the place, so they're optimistic.

Now's the time, though to begin watching for flooding. Might happen, might not. At least the start of this melt season looks pretty orderly and calm, which is a good thing. Temperatures through Saturday will be above normal, but not be a huge amount, so it won't be a big rush of meltwater coming down.

It is going to rain off and on tonight through Sunday, with gaps of drier weather thrown in on Friday. The rainfall through Sunday won't be immense, with the National Weather Service suggesting a range from a half inch or a little less in the southeast to to an inch in the northwest.

Long range forecast for April 4-10 has decent
chances of above normal temperatures in most
of the nation, including us here in the Northeast.
We'll see! 

By Sunday, we will be at risk of some flooding in and around Vermont, especially where ice jams remain.

But this upcoming storm seems mediocre enough so that at this point, the risk of high water seems mediocre, too. My guess is the usual low spots might have water, but we won't exactly have a disaster.  

Keep an eye on it, though. If the rain is much heavier than forecast, then it could get messy.

The first half of next week looks mainly dry, too. We'll have to suffer through a quick shot of cold air Monday (highs in the 30s, lows in the teens and low 20s). It'll warm up quickly by Tuesday to near normal temperatures -- highs in the 40s to around 50.

By that time, there will still be quite a bit of snow in the high elevations, so the flood risk will continue if there are any big rain storms. It's too soon to say if that will be the case.

Cross your fingers, though. It looks like a generally mild pattern once we get into April, if admittably iffy long range forecasts are correct. So maybe no mid-April snow and ice storms this year, like we had in 2018?

That would be nice.

Another Storm Video You Should Watch

Last month, I gave a totally rave review to a storm chasing video by Pecos Hank.

In that post, I mentioned in passing my other favorite storm chaser, Mike Olbinski.

Olbinski usually focuses on Arizona. Every year, in the mid to late summer moisture from the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific Ocean finds its way into the Desert Southwest, creating a "rainy season" of sorts. It's called the seasonal monsoon.

This rainy season in Arizona and surrounding areas  consists of thunderstorms that develop over the region. Unlike the humid East, where haze often obscures the delicate yet powerful structures of thunderstorms, the visibility in the deserts remains great.

Most of what happens with the best of these thunderstorms are microbursts and haboobs, which are thunderstorm-generated dust storms.

Olbinski's beautiful time lapse videos usually focus on these microbursts and dust storms. When you speed up the footage of these phenomeneno, like Olbinski does, you really see the power of these storms.

As in the Pecos Hank video,  I'm not going to provide you with the link, so you can click on it and give Olbinski more hits. At least I think that's how it works.

Just click on this sentence to view the video, called Monsoon V.

Sudden Spring: Generally Warm Outlook For Beginning Of May

Judging from this photo taken at 11 a.m. in  my St. Albans, Vermont
yard, I'm about to have daffodils any second now. 

Well, we finally made it to spring yesterday. Burlington's high temperature was 73 degrees, the first 70 degree reading of the year.

It was the warmest day in exactly six months, as October 24 was the last time it was warmer than yesterday.  

Burlington came close to 70  in February with a record-smashing 69 degrees, and other weather stations in Vermont did pass 70 degrees in February, but as we know all too well, that wasn't really spring.

This, right now,  is really spring. My lawn in two days went from brown to could use a mowing in spots. Trees are budding. My many daffodils, which spent the last month struggling against winter cold and snow, are finally growing like gangbusters and are just about to burst into brilliant yellows and other colors.

Finally!

The outlook for the next 10 days or more is generally very springlike, too!  Temperatures will be near normal today through Saturday -- highs in the 50s and low 60s which is warm enough to keep the plants growing and happy. We will be dodging occasional rain and showers through that period. That's OK. You know what they say about April showers. And for once these aren't snow showers

We get into a brief cool down later Saturday, through Sunday into Monday. Temperatures on Sunday will be especially chilly with highs in the 40s to around 50 with a brisk north wind. That's cool for this time of year, but nothing extreme.

It'll start to warm up on Monday, and at this point most of next week looks quite warm. Of course forecasts could change, but it looks like Vermont will be in the 70s most days next Tuesday through perhaps Friday. We could even see some summerlike 80 degree readings. Definitely not out of the question.

So if you think things are greening up now, just wait until the end of next week!

Inevitably,  there's always a complication. Around May 7 or 8 or so, it looks like at least a brief flip toward cold weather, though of course I don't trust forcasts that far into the future much at all.

I especially hope the American computer forecasting model is wrong - it usually is this far out. But for what it's worth, it forecasts a day or two of pretty much winter cold with maybe a bit of snow and temperatures far below freezing.

That would wreck our welcome emergence into spring by pretty much killing everything that will be growing out there. For now, I wouldn't worry too much about that as that cold prediction is almost surely overblown

For now, enjoy the way everything is greening up!

A Very Picturesque Mountain Celebrates Easter With A Bonnet

A beautiful "Easter Bonnet" lenticular cloud over Mount
Taranaki in New Zealand. 

There's a very picturesque mountain in New Zealand called Mount Taranaki.

A photographer named Martin Quicke recently snapped a photo of the mountain with a beautiful lenticular cloud resting on the summit. Looks like the mountain was wearing an Easter bonnet.

Fun fact: Mount Taranaki has the same legal rights as a person in New Zealand. It's a sacred mountain for the Maori tribe, and it's a popular tourist destination.

The only thing to spoil this is that the photo was taken several days before Easter. Still, what an awesome photo!

Lenticular clouds are formed when winds rise up and over a mountain or other obstacle. The rising air condenses, so you see a cloud. These clouds tend to stay in one place and winds blowing through and around them give them a smooth, curved shape. They're beautiful clouds.

People sometimes mistake them for UFOs because of their shape.

Lenticular clouds usually form above or just downwind of mountains. In this case, the cloud settled right on top of Mount Taranaki. It was just another example of Mother Nature showing off.

Pine Cones And Acorns: Why There's So Many This Year

White pines weighed down by a multitude of pine
cones in Burlington this past summer

The other day, I brought a load of yard waste from a client to a Chittenden Solid Waste District drop off site and nearly fell trying to walk across a big patch of acorns somebody left there. It was like walking on marbles.  

It turns out lots of people are cleaning up TONS of acorns and pine cones and such from their yards this fall. And there's a meteorological reason why. (With me, everything turns to the weather, doesn't it?)

An excellent article by Rebecca Way in the Vermont State Parks blog has an excellent explanation why, but I'll summarize it here.

The summer and fall of 2016 were quite dry here in Vermont, and much of the rest of the Northeast for that matter. When trees are stressed, they produce more cones, seeds and acorns than normal.

These cones and seeds and such started to develop in 2016 as a survival mechanism against the drought. (Produce a lot of seeds and you're more likely to get more seedlings to start growing, which would help perpetrate the species despite the strains of the drought, had it continued on into 2017.)

The summer of 2017 turned out to be rainy enough for trees to survive and thrive just fine. So all those pine cones and acorns and seeds developed just fine, too. You might have noticed over the summer the new pine cones were so plentiful that they weighed down the branches of white pines as if the branches were burdened with a snow or ice storm.

There's also a lot of acorns for the squirrels and you to clean up. And there were plenty of apples this year, too, so that means lots of apple pies for us to enjoy this year.  On top of that, you have plenty of pine cones and red berries to add to your natural holiday decor.

I imagine there will be fewer pine cones and acorns next year, since there were not particular drought stresses on trees this year. True, much of September and October were pretty dry, but that came at the tail end of the growing season, so it won't affect trees all that much. Especially since the rains returned in recent weeks, which put moisture in the ground to start off next spring.

Dodge City, Kansas Was Most Photogenic And Dangerous Place To Be On Tuesday

Two tornadoes on the ground simultaneously
near Dodge City, Kansas Tuesday.  

Dodge City, Kansas was ground zero for a massive supercell thunderstorm, tornadoes, at least one of which was enormous, and some incredible clouds.

It you're a weather geek that's into photography, Dodge City, Kansas was the best place in the world to be yesterday.

Unfortunately, it came with a price. NBC News reports two people critically injured in the Dodge City tornadoes, and some buildings destroyed.

On the bright side, Dodge City missed a major disaster. The big tornado just barely missed the city's downtown, which is a great thing.

Massive tornado on the ground near Dodge City,
Kansas Tuesday. From @TornadoGreg on Twitter.  

As an aside, the reminds me exactly of an old episode of "Gunsmoke" which was set in Dodge City. That episode had a tornado hitting some farms, but missing downtown Dodge City.

The tornadoes around Dodge City took many forms, including one that looked like a massive stovepipe.

There were tornadoes with multiple vorticies within them, and at one point, there were two, possibly even three tornadoes on the ground around Dodge City simultaneously.

After the tornadoes, the city was treated to the sight of mammatus clouds at sunset associated with the departing supercell thunderstorm.

Mammatus clouds over Dodge City after the tornadi
supercell storm passed Tuesday. Phot from @extremewinds
on Twitter.  

These clouds form from ice crystals way at the top of the thunderstorm. This area is known as the anvil, because it extends somewhat horizontally on top of the storm and is shaped something like an anvil.

The ice crystals sink and evaporate, forming the pouch-shaped clouds.

The Dodge City storms formed near what is known as a dry line, which is a sharp north to south line in which it's quite humid to the east and very dry to the west.

This time of year, supercell storms and tornadoes often form along dry lines, so this storm wasn't so unusual.

The dry line wavers back and forth across the Plains. In fact, the dry line briefly moved east of Dodge City after the storms, then quickly moved back to the west again, so it's humid there again

The wavering dry line that's still out there and will be much of this week sets the stage for possibly more severe storms and tornadoes today and especially tomorrow in the central Plains, including the area around Dodge City.

Here's video of the tornadoes from Dan Robinson:



Here's another video of the tornado from Val and Amy Castor:

Spectacular Ice Bridge Collapse in Patagonia

An ice bridge collapses spectacularly at a
Patagonian glacier recently. 

Viral video is circulating this week of a huge ice bridge collapsing at a glacier in the Patagonia area of Argentina.

The video, which you can see below, is quite spectacular. It's worth the watch.

Collapsing glaciers really are stock footage when people want to illustrate the effects of climate change, but in this case, climate change has nothing to do with the drama.

Instead, the glacier advances over Lake Argentina, damming it. The water eventually   tunnels beneath the glacier, forming a giant ice bridge.

The water continues to erode the ice under the bridge until it can no longer support its own weight. Then it collapses in dramatic fashion as you see in the video.

The process at this particular glacier repeats itself roughly once every four years, give or take.

Here's the video:

Something Called Kelvin-Helmholtz Is A Thing Of Beauty

Beautiful Kelvin-Helmholtz clouds over
Breckenridge, Colorado last week. 

A Kelvin-Helmholtz cloud hit the ski resort of Breckenridge, Colorado last week.

Don't worry, everything's fine. The name sounds like maybe a toxic gas enveloped the region, but nope! Kelvin-Helmholtz is a thing of beauty.

The clouds resemble breaking waves in a sea. They sometimes form when air at higher levels of the atmosphere is moving much faster than the layer below it.

The high speed air up top will sometimes grap the top layer of lower lying clouds and form them into wave-like structures.

As you can see in the time lapse of the Breckenridge clouds, below, they're quite beautiful. Especially when you see them at sunset, like what happened in the video.

For those of us on the ground Kelvin-Helmholtz clouds are absolutely nothing to worry about. They are a sign of instability and rough air up above, so airliners and pilots tend to watch out for these.

Here's the video:

El Nino Makes Barren Chilean Desert Bloom Gorgeously

The Atacama Desert in Chili is normally one of the most desolate places on Earth.

It's on the east side of the Andes mountains, and is pretty much blocked from any moisture that wants to sneak in from the Pacific Ocean.

Moisture from places like the Amazon, and the Atlantic Ocean way, way, way off to the east are also blocke by moisture.

So the Atacama desert is barren. It's one of the driest places on Earth. In many places in this desert, you can go years without measureable rain. There are actually little sections of this desert where it hasn't rained in 400 years! 

However, during a very strong El Nino, the kind we are having now, the ocean on the Chilean coastt warms, which encourages particularly strong storms to form near that Chilean coast.

The strong storms then allow some moisture to force its way over the mountains into the Atacama desert, and it will rain a little in parts of what looks like a wasteland.

Then a miracle happens. According to the Bored Panda web site this is what happens in those rare occasions when it rains:

"The flowers 'hibernating' beneath its surface suddenly bloom with an explosion of color, eager to take advantage of the rain.'

The Atacama desert then turns into a flowery psychelic paradise, as the photos in this post from Bored Panda indicate. (Click on the pics to make them bigger and easier to enjoy.)

Daniel Diaz, the National Tourism Service director in Atacama said in 2015, this bloom has happened twice in the same year, whih has never been seen in recorded history.

I'll just enjoy the photos of the flowers, and for once in my life, I'll wish I was in the Atacama desert.

Mike Olbinski Strikes Again With Awesome Storm Time Lapse Compilation

Mike Olbinski strikes again with his new monsoon
storm time lapse compilation. Just awesome.  

I've become a big fan of photographer and storm chaser Mike Olbinski.

Some of his work has already been featured in this here weather blog thingy.

However,  you can never get too much of Mike Olbinski.

He says he logged 48 days and 17,000 miles, mostly in Arizona during the summer monsoon storm season capturing these storms.

He's collected images of the storms into an artistic time lapse compilation that is just mesmerizing to watch over and over again.

This is true whether or not you're a weather geek.

I love how in many of the segments, you can see the thunderstorm microbursts heavily crashing to the ground. I'm sure whoever or whatever was under those microbursts had quite a jolt of wind and rain, to say the least!

He captures the bubbling up of towering thunderheads, strobe light lightning at night that makes you almost feel like you're in a bad 1980s nightclub, and dust storms blasting across the desert landscape.

Here's the video:

Wild Video: Flash Flood In Utah

Wild flash flood captured by David Rankin in Utah

I've featured these flash flood videos before, but I can't get enough of them.

Videographer and photographer David Rankin caught a particularly good one in southern Utah on August 30. A large storm dumped as much as 2.5 inches of rain over normally dry, mountainous terrain in the region.

Flash floods are a common consequence of these storms, but this one is particularly wild. You can see how dangerous they are, with all the logs and debris these rushes of water pick up.

In the drone footage within the video, you can see the storm in the distance that's causing the flash flood.

Pretty amazing:

An Icy Summer Thrill In Newfoundland As Iceberg Collapses

An icdberg in King Point, Newfoundland last week.  

Beachgoers in Newfoundland got quite a thrill last week when an iceberg showed up at a bay in Kings Point, then collapsed.

The collapse sent a mini-tsunami crashing onto the beach. Everybody got out of the way and nobody was hurt. The collapse was captured on the really cool video you'll see below.

Icebergs make pretty frequent visits to Newfoundland and surrounding areas of eastern Canada.

Most of the icebergs people see in the summer around Newfoundland and Labrador come from western Greenland coastline, as glaciers calve off the enormous chunks of ice.  Ocean currents bring the icebergs southward toward Newfoundland.

Here's the video, followed by more videos of icebergs this summer around Newfoundland and Labrador. Apparently, these iceberg dramas are fairly common up there.



Here's an iceberg collapsing near Twillingale, Newfoundland on July 3:



And here's a drone view of an iceberg collapsing in Labrador back in June:

Hutchinson, Kansas Tornado Was An Awesome Thing

The giant Hutchinson, Kansas tornado
roping out and stirring up a big
 cloud of dust on Monday.  

As part of a massive severe weather outbreak in the nation Monday (more on that later) a large tornado touched down right near Hutchinson, Kansas.  

Luckily, the enormous storm did not go right through Hutchinson, but mostly stayed in rural areas just outside town. So damage wasn't all that great.

What was great was how photogenic the Hutchinson tornado was. And how far and wide you could see it. One of the videos below is from a drone that captured the tornado.

From the photos (click on them to embiggen them) one person took a photo of the tornado from a jetliner flying sort of nearby. Another great photo is the one when the tornado is "roping out" but still flinging up tons of dust.

The tornado came out of a what is known as a low precipitation supercell, obviously meaning there wasn't much in the way of rain to spoil the tornado show.

Roping out is what a tornado very often does when it's falling apart and dissipating. It gets narrower and narrower until it finally looks like a rope dangling from the sky. Then it falls apart and becomes pretty much nothing.

The Hutchinson tornado as seen from a passing jetliner.  

The tornado near Hutchinson surely wasn't nothing, though.  

For videos, let's start with that drone view. I love how sunny and pleasant it seems where the drone is, in contrast to where the tornado is swirling:



Here's another view of it:

Flash Flood Video Shows Incredible Wall of Water, Debris

Flash floods in Chile earlier this year
hit normally arid parts of that country.  

There have been a lot of flash floods around the nation this late spring and early summer. Places from Colorado to Vermont have suffered flash flood damage in just the past week.

Obviously, flash flooding can be very dangerous.

A video that emerged recently proves the point.

Heavy rain and flash flooding this past March hit what is normally an arid part of Chile.

The floods killed at least 14 people and as many as 20 people are still missing, according to published reports.

The flash flooding in the video is dramatic, and as flash floods are, very abrupt.

I don't know if I would have stood there and filmed like this guy did, but YIKES!

Here's the video:

More Incredibly Photogenic Supercells In Plains Yesterday

I know I just did this yesterday, but I can't resist posting another time lapse of a supercell storm.

This one is near Jetmore, Kansas last evening is absolutely beautiful, so I have to post it. So here you go:

Tis The Season Of Spring Weather Porn Storms. VERY Dramatic Images

From @MattHinesTX via Twitter, a dramatic
view of the spinning supercell thunderstorm
in Texas that produced several tornadoes.  

The nation's severe weather season is in full swing, though fortunately it is so far not as intense as it is in many years.

Still, there has been some drama. Even the quietest years have some drama.

On Sunday, severe thunderstorms broke in Texas.

One supercell storm in particular created some startling images as it marched kind of slowly eastward through north central Texas from near Abilene to a little southwest of the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area.

A posse of storm chasers remained closely attached to the supercell as it repeatedly dropped tornadoes across the Texas prairie.

They got some great photos and videos of the storm.

Almost all of the 19 reports of tornadoes in the nation Sunday came from this supercell thunderstorm, though I'm sure some of these are duplicate reports.

Luckily, no individual tornado lasted too long with this supercell, and the twisters hit rural areas. That meant there wasn't all that much damage, which was a good thing.

A beautiful image of a giant supercell thunderstorm
that produced tornadoes in Texas Sunday
Photo from Kelly DeLay via Twitter.  

For part of its life, the supercell storm had one of the best cloud structures I've ever seen, and certainly the best and most dramatic I've seen this year so far.

The mesocyclone - that's the real spinning part of the storm that would produce tornadoes - produced a large rotating, black column rising high into the air.

The curved, spiral bands of this mesocyclone looked like something out of one of those bad alien invasion movies.

It's no surprise that this kind of storm structure is often referred to as a mothership.

As you can see, I've posted some photos of this beast taken by storm chasers.

It's too bad supercell thunderstorms and tornadoes cause so much damage, death and heartache. If not for that, they would be truly beautiful things, some of the most awe inspiring examples of nature at work.

From StormChasingVideo.com, we get this footage of the Texas supercell, complete with day and nighttime views of some of the tornadoes it spit out, giant hail cracking the video taker's windshield, a hailstone that measures four inches across - almost grapefruit size! - and lots of lightning:


Other severe storms broke over the weekend elsewhere.

Here's a wild video of straight line winds Saturday in Dothan, Alabama. Whoever installed the homeowner's fence did a good job. I would have thought the winds would have flattened it.



Near Jacksonville, Florida, some people driving down a busy suburban boulevard suddenly encountered a tornado.

The thunderstorm that caused the tornado pretty much had a tornado warning with it almost all the way across northern Florida as it moved west to east. The Jacksonville touchdown, and any others that might have occured, were relatively brief.

Still, pretty scary:

Some of the Coolest Funnel Clouds Are Overseas

Two YouTube videos popped up this week that depict absolutely gorgeous funnel clouds.

One shows a waterspout over the Baltic Sea with a rainbow in the foreground. Love how the funnel and the rainbow sort of bend in the same sort of way, almost like dance partners:





The next video shows a tornado in Kazakhstan this week. I love how the dark funnel is set off against the brilliant blue sky in the background. Really nice use of color, Mother Nature!