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.

Dramatic Videos Show The Weather Could Always Be Worse Where You Are

A five story building begins to topple into a
river in China during severe floods recently. Video
is below. 

It's a somewhat cloudy Sunday, and us Vermonters are destined to endure a very rainy, quite chilly Monday.  

As Trump would tweet: Sad!

To prove it could always be worse, what follows are some videos that show some pretty dramatic storms elsewhere in the world. T

hey will make you happy that your biggest weather problem is a dreary, wet and cold midsummer start to the workweek.

The bad weather has hit all corners of the world, as you'll see.

For starters, we've had a week of repeated severe storms stretching from South Dakota, through the Great Lakes and on into the Mid-Atlantic states. (There was even a rogue, isolated severe thunderstorm Saturday in southern Addison and Rutland counties in Vermont, but I don't think there was widespread damage.)

Not true elsewhere, though, as this video of a terrible hailstorm Tuesday in South Dakota. The hail, with wind, even managed to split a tree in this view of a back yard during the storm:




New Zealand has been hit this past week by a massive winter storm. (Southern Hemisphere, so it's winter there.)

Some areas received up to 10 inches of rain. One of the hard hit cities was Churchchrist, which has had a rough time in recent years. That city had a destructive, deadly earthquake in 2011.

Here's a video from New Zealand:



Farmers have to work in all kinds of weather, and Clinton Monchuk this past week was spraying fungicide on his malt barley fields near Lanigan, Saskachewan, Canada, and was accompanied on  his chores by a tornado:


In Cornwall, England, severe flash flooding hit this week and several people had to be rescued.

Here's a view that includes massive amounts  of flood water flowing into the sea:



Finally, this includes some of the most dramatic footage: Watch a truck and a building fall into rivers amid severe flooding in China in the past few days: