A Couple Of Images, Videos To Remind You Severe Weather Season Is At Peak

Incredible cloud structure of a storm that
had a tornado warning with it near Eads, Oklahoma
last week. Photo by Everett Occhipinti, on
Twitter   @Ejocch  

Another round of severe thunderstorms, tornadoes, hail barrages and floods is set to blossom across the Great Plains Friday and especially Saturday as we are in the peak of severe weather season.

NOAA's Storm Prediction Center says preliminary data shows there have been 384 reports of tornadoes so far this year in the United States.

That compares to 325 through May 31 of last year, so the trend in the past two or three years of fewer tornadoes seems to be waning.

There will certainly be a number of new tornado reports by Monday.  We can hope that none hit populated areas, but of course you can't count on that kind of luck. Just ask the people picking up the pieces from last week's tornadoes in Van, Texas and Delmont, South Dakota. 

I've said it before: It's sad that we get such incredible photos and videos of the incredible power of nature, but the unfair tradeoff, at least to us humans, is the sadness and tragedy of fatal tornadoes in innocent American towns.

All we can do is warn people in harm's way, and keep the science research to improve those warnings and build more tornado-resistant buildings.

And we will still gape in awe at these storms. Like this time lapse of a storm that came this close to producing a tornado as it swept through a part of Texas last month.



This next video has been widely circulated, but is still worth showing here. It's a tornado passing by or through a rainbow in Colorado earlier this month: