"Ghost Apples" Were A Cool, Amazing Legacy Of Michigan Ice Storm

A "ghost apple" in Michigan. Freezing rain formed around rotten
apples on a tree. The branch shook, the apple fell but left its
icy coating behind. Photo by Andrew Sietsema.

Bouts of ice and freezing rain have been creating havoc off and on from Washington State to New England and beyond this month.

Count me among those who hate freezing rain. You can't drive in it, first of all. That is if you can hack your way through the ice to get inside your car.  

I'm tired of falling on ice, and since I'm getting older, I'm starting to increase my risk of getting hurt in these tumbles. Too much freezing rain brings down trees and power lines.

Yet, like anything else, there's a silver lining to silver thaws, as ice storms are often called. Sun glinting on ice covered trees is gorgeous, for instance. I suppose you can turn your driveway into a nice ice skating rink after freezing rain.  I'm grasping at straws here.

However, one very cool thing happened in Michigan after an ice storm earlier this month. This time of year, people who operate apple orchards begin pruning trees. Late winter is the time to do that.

Another "ghost apple" in Michigan. Photo by Andrew Sietsema via
WOOD-TV

One orchard operator in Kent County, Michigan named Andrew Sietsema went out pruning his apple orchard after an ice storm.

When he pruned, rotten apples still on the trees and encased in ice fell off the trees because the trees were shaking as he lopped off branches.

Most of the time, the ice and the apples fell off together.   But not always.

Apples have a freezing point a little colder than plain water. Temperatures while Sietsema was working were just perfect.  As WOOD-TV in Grand Rapids reported, it was warm enough for the apples to thaw, but cold enough so that the ice from the freezing rain stayed put.

As the trees shook, some of the mushy thawed rotten apples fell off the trees, but the ice that encased the apples stayed behind, attached to the trees.  As you can see by the photos in the post, this created what Sietsema called "ghost apples."  

The ice left behind after the old apples fell formed perfect molds of the apples that were once there. They looked like beautiful glass Christmas ornaments.

Pilot Takes Awesome Photo Of Haboob In Phoenix

Aerial view of thunderstorm and haboob
approaching Phoenix Sunday.  

Ryan Vermillion was piloting a Southwest Airlines flight Sunday that departed the Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport.

His was the last flight that departed before the airport closed for a time, due to a haboob, says the Washington Post's Capital Weather Gang. 

A haboob is a big wall of dust that often accompanies a gust front from a thunderstorm in desert locations during monsoon season, which is now.

The dust is blinding and dangerous, so they always close the airport when one hits.

Once Vermillion got the plane up to 11,000, he steered east, back toward Phoenix and on to his destination.

He got a great view of the haboob and the thunderstorm causing it, and the photo is in this post. Click on it to make it bigger and easier to see.

Sometimes haboobs can cause pileups on local freeways since visibility drops to such low levels, but in this instance, there were no reports of serious problems in and around Phoenix.

Awesome Time Lapse Of Big Storm Engulfing Manhattan

Severe thunderstorms hit parts of the Northeast Thursday.

I found this awesome time lapse of one of the strong storms engulfing Manhattan, then just as quickly zipping on out of town:

Another Spectacular Time Lapse Video by Nicholas Wegner

Nicholaus Wegner has released a new timelapse video of
storms, and the video is absolutely gorgeous. 

A little over a year ago, I highlighted a spectacular time lapse video of severe HIgh Plains storms by photographer Nicholaus Wegner. 

It was called Stormscapes 2, a followup to a previous, similarly named video. The photography and the awesomeness of the storms is worth viewing again and again.

Now Wegner is back with Stormscapes 3, a time l lapse compilation of the storms he chased during 2015.

He's really outdone himself with this one.  It is a gorgeous video any weather geek, and anybody else for that matter will want to watch over and over, just to experience Wegner and nature's art.

His forte are supercell thunderstorms, and other extreme spring and summer storms on the High Plains of Wyoming, Colorado and other spots in the region.

Wegner captures the fascinating and sometimes abrupt these dangerous storms undergo as they loom over the remote prairies, hills and farmsteads in the West.

On Stormcapes3, my favorite part is the energizing ending with the all the lightning. Wegner advices against watching that segment of the video if you're sensitive to strobe lights and rapid-fire flashes.

The best way to watch the video, below, is to use full screen and have on some high quality headphones, as the music is wonderfully synchronized to the video.

Hat tip to Slate for alerting us to this new video.

Maybe The Coolest Tornado Photo Ever

I'm no expert, but I imagine it's next to impossible to photograph a tornado at night.

It can be dangerous to photograph tornadoes any time of day, what with their unpredictability, all that wind and annoying flying debris you get with these things if you're too close.

But at night it's even worse. You don't see them except during brief lightning flashes or electrical power flashes that happen when a tornado trashes its way through a utility line or transformers.

That's why I haven't seen too many good nighttime tornado photos and videos.

But mostly nocturnal tornado outbreak in Texas and Kansas Monday evening proved to be photogenic for some talented photographers.

This included one of the best photos I've ever seen of a tornado, at any time of day, the one in this post. It was taken by Jenny Brown of Texas Storm Chasers. 

Click on the image to make it bigger and easier to see.

The photo shows a Texas supercell near Pampa, lit up by a big lightning bolt. You can see at the base of the supercell, way off in the distance, a large tornado. Above the supercell, you can see stars serenely twinkling.

The image is somehow calming, even though you know there's a dangerous tornado in the photo. I love the bluish tint to the clear skies above contrasted with the redish llight at the bottom, presumably from car headlights.

The composition and light of this photo is so perfect. Congratulations to Jenny Brown for this awesome photo. Go to  her Facebook page and check out more. And maybe you could contact her to buy prints of this photo, or maybe some of her other awesome images.

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:

Monsoon Season: Dust Storms Start On Time In Arizona

A dust storm approaching Phoenix, Arizona this past
Saturday. Photo by Pat Smith Johnson  

In mid to late summer, thunderstorms develop over the deserts of Arizona.  These thunderstorms can create dust storms, and it's often quite a spectacle.

This combination is a creature of the annual monsoon season out in these deserts.

The unrelenting heat of summer causes air to rise, creating an area of low pressure in the deserts.

The low pressure is not a storm system, like normal lows. It's just the fact that the air is rising, and for complicated reasons, that leads to low atmospheric pressure, at least compared to surrounding areas.

When there's low pressure, air wants to come into the area of low pressure. Nature abhors a vacuum. Weak low pressure isn't a vacuum, of course, but still, things try to find an equilibrium. So air comes in to replace the air that has risen because it's so damn hot.

Some of this air comes from over or near the Gulf of Mexico. You know how gawd awful humid the Texas coast can get this time of year. Some of that humidity travels toward the deserts. The humidity is enough to help trigger thunderstorms.

The thunderstorms, by their nature, are hit and miss. There's still a lot of dust and sand out in the deserts that hasn't been drenched by a thunderstorm in the past couple days. That's pretty much true no matter how active the monsoon and thunderstorm activity has been.

Strong outflow winds from these storms often blow out into these dry areas, and kick up a ton of dust and sand. These outflow boundaries, and the dust they pick up, can travel many miles.

A thunderstorm a dozen or more miles from Phoenix can eventually envelope the city in dust.

The hottest time of year in the deserts is June, with that strong sun. By late June or early July, the process I just described has started the monsoons. The first ones, right on schedule, hit in the last few days.

ArizonaStormChase captured this awesome dust storm near Casa Grande, Arizona. Pretty cool!

Aliens Landing In Dublin? No, Just Awesome Clouds

Elena Gibson captured this alien spaceship altocumulus
lenticularis cloud over Dublin.  

It was a gorgeous day in often dreary Dublin, Ireland today.

The air was warm, the sky was a deep blue, dotted with just a few.......what are those spaceships from an alien invasion?

No, they were something called altocumulus standing lenticularis clouds, and Dublin got a rare treat, as these clouds usually form over or near mountains, and usually not over Dublin.

I've seen these clouds every once in awhile where I live in mountainous Vermont.

The clouds also usually form in the colder half of the year, not in the summer.

These beautiful clouds when the atmosphere is relatively stable. In other words, there aren't incredibly strong updrafts, the kind that makes thunderstorms.

The lenticular clouds form when fast moving air above us is forced to rise up and over a barrier, usually a mountain or mountain range that's perpendicular to the direction of the wind.

Picture a fast moving brook in which the water is forced up and over a rock protruding from the middle of the river.

Lenticular clouds over Dublin, via @JoeyGartian on Twitter. 

The water goes over the rock, then there's a series of waves downstream in which the water echoes its motion over the rock.

The mountain the air is going up and over is like the rock in that stream, and there's a series of waves downstream in the air. These are called gravity waves.

When the air rises to form the peak of these gravity waves, the air cools and condenses, forming clouds.

Clouds always form when air rises, cools and condenses, so why do these clouds look so cool? It's because the strong winds sort of smooth out the clouds and shape them into something that's lens shaped, hence the name of the clouds.

Looks like the Starship Enterprise is over Dublin
From Twitter via B_Fitsimons.  

The often form into shapes that remind people of alien spaceships. A few people have been known to call 911 when they see these clouds, thinking an alien attack is underway.

These clouds tend to sit in one place, much like the waves you see downstream from that rock in the river.

The atmosphere must also have just the right amount of moisture in just the right layer, and winds must be just the right speed to form these clouds. That's why you don't see them everyday. In many places, like Dublin, they're quite rare.

Upwind from Dublin, there must be some hills or mountains that got these going. Or, there was a pocket of especially stable air that set the air rising up and over it. Maybe a weak warm front? I'm not sure.

Anyway, Dubliners enjoyed the show on a glorious June day.

Wild, Photogenic Tornado, Supercell Videos From North Dakota

Saturday's tornadic supercell in North Dakota.  

On Saturday, a scary looking rotating supercell thunderstorm raced southeastward from Canada into North Dakota.

StormChasingVideo.com personnel got a lot of it on video.

Saturday was a fairly busy day for tornadoes in the nation, with 24 reports of them, says NOAA's Storm Prediction Center. The tornadoes were in the Dakotas, Minnesota and the Mid-Atlantic States.

One of StormChasingVideo.com's film shows a narrow, but photogenic tornado zipping across the countryside northwest of Grand Rapids, Michigan. This tornado does not appear to have done much structural damage, as it was in a remote location.

Great video,:



StormChasingVideo.com also got shots of hail and rain, which were pretty dramatic, but  I LOVE the time lapse segments of their video.

Watch:

Texas Supercell Was A Gorgeous Beauty

A different view of the Texas supercell than the one
in the video below. This photo is from a passing airliner.
 

Supercell thunderstorms erupted east of Lubbock, Texas on Saturday.

Supercells are pretty much always bad, unleasing large hail, damaging winds, torrential rains and sometimes tornadoes.  

This one was no different, containing all of the above, although the tornado appears to have been really just a funnel cloud that never quite touched down.

Luckily, this storm moved over sparsely populated terrain, so there weren't a whole lot of buildings for the supercell to wreck or people to hurt.

The storm was beautiful, as these often deadly storms are.

The National Weather Service in Lubbock captured a time lapse of the storm from their offices.

It looks like two storms formed, merged, and then blossomed over the Texas prairie. It really looks like some massive series of explosions.

You can see in the video, below, the fast erupting clouds, the anvil top of the storm spreading out, and if you look carefully, the whole storm rotating, which is one of the main reasons the National Weather Service issued a tornado warning on the storm.

Watch the vid:

Dramatic "Light Pillars" Grace Skies Around Burlington, Vermont This Morning

Light pillars loom in the sky
over Burlington, Vermont International
Airport early this morning. Photo
from National Weather Service,
South Burlington, Vermont.  

The National Weather Service office in Burlington, Vermont posted a photo they took on social media of amazing light pillars that became visible before dawn over the area.

Light pillars appear as columns of light directly upward from an unshielded light.

They form during very cold weather when plate-shaped ice crystals that normally are high up in the atmosphere float close to the ground instead. Horizontal sections of the crystals reflect the light back downward, says Atmospheric Optics. 

The pillars are aren't really a physical presense. Instead, they are a collection of light beams from millions of ice crystals which are reflecting light toward your eyes. The crystals that create the pillars are about halfway between you and the lights.

The higher the crystals are in the sky the taller the light pillar will appear.

The ice crystals this morning seemed to extend pretty high up, judging from the size of the light pillars towering over the Burlington International Airport terminal in the photo.

The weather was certainly right for light pillar formation around Burlington before dawn today. The temperature was a little below zero, winds were calm, and ice crystals could just sort of float around and create the pillars.

See? Even nasty cold nights can be beautiful sometimes.

Butterfly-Shaped "Rain Showers" On St. Louis Weather Radar Turned Out To Be Butterflies

National Weather Service radar in St. Louis, Missouri
captured a butterfly shaped cloud of monarch
butterflies passing overhead on their
migration to Mexico.  

A really awesome and cool "weather disturbance" of sorts passed over the St. Louis, Missouri metro area last week, the web site CityLab reports.

National Weather Service radar in St. Louis showed what looked to be showers, or tornado debris, or something, constantly changing shape as it moved southward toward Mexico.

All other indications showed there were no storms or weather disturbances that could cause rain, tornadoes or anything else of note in Missouri. It was a really nice day.

For awhile, the "disturbance" heading toward Mexico took on the shape of a giant butterfly over  St. Louis and most of its suburbs.

It turns out the radar was picking up a giant flock of monarch butterflies migrating south toward Mexico.  The monarchs were really cool and thoughtful, in my opinion, to fly in the formation of a giant butterfly as they headed south.

Monarchs that live in the summer east of the Rocky Mountains fly to a specific mountain area in Mexico, where they hang out in oyamel fir trees for the winter. (They can't survive the cold winters in most of the United States.)

They also reproduce over the winter in Mexico, and the next generation of monarchs fly north for us to enjoy each spring.

That such a large number of monarchs is a good sign, as CityLab notes. Habitat loss, extreme weather and possibly pesticides have decimated the numbers of these beautiful butterflies, so here's hoping this radar image shows they're hanging in there.

Or maybe their dwindling numbers appeared on the radar to tell us to do things to protect them and let their numbers recover.

Totally Awesome Timelapse Of Supercell Storm Over Barcelona

This video has it all. Scenic location, good production values, and best of all, a rotating supercell thunderstorm.

Video was taken in the past week in Barcelona, Spain. Totally amazing!!

Forest Fire Crashes Wedding; Beautiful Photos Result

From Buzzfeed:        

Wedding photographer Josh Newton got this
awesome shot of newlyweds Michael and April Wolber
as a forest fire threatened to crash their Oregon
wedding recently.   

A couple got married last week in a beautiful patch of forest near Bend, Oregon.

Of course, the wedding had to be rushed because partway through the ceremony, firefighters crashed the event.

They told the couple, Michael and April Wolber, and their guests that a large forest fire was heading in their direction. The firefighters allowed the couple to get through the ceremony really fast, then evacuate.

Hmm. Weather is always a risk when you hold an outdoor wedding. But a forest fire? That's certainly unusual. But maybe not so in much of the tinder dry western United States.

(The reception was to be held in a spot away from the fire anyway.)

Before the party fled, the couple's wedding photographer, Josh Newton got some unexpectedly awesome shots for the Wolbers. One of them, the best in my opinion is in this post.

Everybody's wedding is memorable, but this one surely is especially so.

Great Satellite View Of Today's Massive Storm

The huge storm that caused all kinds of issues in the eastern half of the nation, including blizzards,

tornadoes, floods, severe thunderstorms and high winds, looked awesome today in this satellite photo from NOAA:

Click on the image to make it bigger and easier to see the details.

Rare "Roll Cloud" Wows Texas, And Then The Rest Of Us

A rare "roll cloud" rolled right over the community of Timbercreek Canyon Texas this week, and it's getting a lot of attention because it was so dramatic.

The dramatic, rare, scary but harmless and beautiful
roll cloud over Texas this week.  

Bonnie Mack took what is becoming a viral video of the roll cloud as it passed over her Timbercreek Canyon home, not far from Amarillo.

You can see the video at the bottom of this post. The cloud stretches as far as the eye can see.

Roll clouds look freaky and scary and otherworldly, and something like a horizontal tornado but they're never dangerous.

They often form some distance from a thunderstorm, when a cool air downdraft blowing out of the storm hits the ground, kind of rises again and puts a horizontal spin in the air. That horizontal spin sometimes forms into what are known as roll clouds.

The air needs precisely the right amount of spin and moisture to make a roll cloud. Almost always, a cool downdraft doesn't form a roll cloud. In rare instances, it does.

You don't necessarily need a thunderstorm to make a roll cloud. But as rare as roll clouds are, they are even more infrequent when there's no thunderstorms around.

You do need an influx of cold air and that's what you see in Bonnie Mack's video. There were no nearby thunderstorms as she filmed.

A cold front apparently came in and displaced some warmer air, and the atmospheric conditions were just right to produce the horizontal spin the air that became the roll cloud.

Mack reported that a gust of cool air blew through her property as the roll cloud passed overhead, which is to be expected near such a phenomenon.

After all the weather disasters the world has seen lately, it is refreshing to see a dramatic weather phenomenon caught on tape that did no harm to anybody, and is not a sign of anything ominous to come.

Here's the roll cloud video:

Violent Storm Looks Incredibly Peaceful From A Passing Jet

The storms last Friday over Nebraska and Iowa were violent. All hell was breaking out beneath the storms: Large tornadoes, gigantic hailstones, tremendous, destructive winds, scary lightning, torrential rains

A still from the beautiful storm video  

While all this was going on, a New York to Los Angeles flight was doing a detour around the worst of the storms.

It was nearing sunset, and setting sun lit up the clouds in a soft pink.

From the plane, the violent storm, with it's puffy roiling clouds, the lightning flashes muted by the thick thunderheads, seemed peaceful, relaxing, soft, inviting

Someone on the plane thought to shot a video. Here it is,  Just gorgeous and fascinating:

Quiet Weather, So We Post a Dramatic Storm Time Lapse

The weather is quiet over Vermont and the northeast as we begin the workweek, so, in our never-ending quest to display weather porn, that SFW, kid-friendly series of storm and extreme weather videos and images, we bring you a time lapse of a supercell thunderstorm over Kansas more than two years ago.

The speeded up video really shows how the storm rotates and really, really tries to form a tornado. (The storm apparently did eventually produce a tornado, but after the sunset, so there's no good videos of that funnel.

Still, this video is quite spectacular: