Fire And Ice Raining Down On Us

From NBC News: Cars burn after being caught in a brush fire
that swept across Interstate 15 in California.  

As usual, there was plenty of weird weather drama around the United States and around the world in the past couple of days.

You probably heard about that brush fire in very, very droughty California. It swept across a freeway somewhere near San Bernardino, stopping motorists in thick smoke, sending the drivers running for their lives.

The fire along Interstate 15 set a number of vehicles on fire. At least 20 cars were destroyed.

Sounds like a blast. Not that kind of traffic issue I'd want to encounter

Luckily, I haven't heard of any serious injuries. More weird weather to report below this freeway brush fire video:



Meanwhile, in sunny Hawaii, it snowed Friday. In July. Seriously.

A passing thunderstorm and near freezing temperatures atop 13,796 Mauna Kea combined to produce the 1.5 inches of snow Friday.

It's a wicked tall mountain, so it snows regularly there in the winter, but no so often in the summer. But it does happen sometimes.

Don't worry, the balmy beaches of Waikiki didn't share in the snow. The high temperature in Honolulu yesterday was 90 degrees

Check out this timelapse taken atop Mauna Kea Friday. You see nothing until halfway through the 24-second video, so be patient:



An even rarer snow hit parts of Australia this week, too. It IS winter in the Land Down Under, so you expect it to be colder there. And it often snows in the high elevations in parts of Australia during their winter.

Areas near Sydney recorded the coldest temperatures and the most snow since the 1970s and 1980s. There wasn't much snow, just a few inches, and it didn't fall in the big cities, but nearby, it did snow.

You'd expect to see the scene in the next video in Buffalo, New York in December, not Australia any time of year, but this is what it looked like this week:




Back in the United States, a spell of very humid, hot weather is spending the weekend in the eastern half of the nation. I don't expect many, if any record highs to fall, but the humidity is hellish.

And, that's contributing to ice. Giant hailstones fell on parts of the northern Plains, especially in South Dakota, as you'll see in the video below.  Hail in some areas was as big as baseballs or even soft balls. Though the hail itself certainly wasn't soft!

There were also reports of tornadoes. Winds gusted to (Yikes!) 97 mph near Clear Lake, South Dakota and 92 mph in Summit, South Dakota.

The tornadic storms evolved into a nasty squall line that swept across Minnesota and was waking people up before dawn in Wisconsin early this morning with lots of wind and lightning

Expect more storms, some strong to severe in the Great Lakes and maybe into parts of New England today.

Here's a tornadic storm, beginning with a time lapse of a wall cloud, then a TON of hail near Sisseton, South Dakota Friday. Video is from StormChasingVideo