Image From Space: Incredible Photo Of Lightning Flashing In Hurricane Eye

Astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti captured
lightning flashing in the eye of Cyclone Bansi last week.  

My new best friend is Samantha Crisoforetti.

We never met each other, but I, like everyone else in the weather geek community,  has spent the past several days gaping at awe at a photograph she took, the one in this blog post.  

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

She's an astronaut on the International Space Station, and she snapped a nighttime photo of very strong Cyclone Bansi in the southern Indian Ocean.

(Hurricanes are called Cyclones in the Indian Ocean.)

When she took the photo, a flash of lightning popped in the eyewall of this storm. As noted in the Washington Post's Capital Weather Gang, the flash illuminates the clouds lining the eye of the storm. They curve backward from the center, giving the eye the appearance of a stadium.

You also see one low cloud extending across the base of the eye, which I often see in strong hurricanes for some reason.

The lightning flash brilliantly lit up the eye, but also slightly illuminated the entire eyewall around the cyclone. You can see the swirling, chaotic cloud structures with the intense storm.

You HAVE To Watch This Arizona Monsoon/Storm Time Lapse

Mike Olbinski captured this image of
a haboob rolling into Phoenix in 2012.  

Photographer and videographer Mike Olbinski compiled what I believe is the BEST EVER time lapse compilation of all those monsoon thunderstorms, clouds and dust storms in Arizona this past summer.

Olbinski is a wedding and storm chase photographer based in Arizona.

If you were wowed in the past few years by any photos of haboobs, lightning, clouds, storms and floods in Arizona, chances are, Olbinski took the shot.

Olbinski says he logged 14,000 miles between June 15 and Sept. 30 to document what turned out to be one of the most active monsoon seasons in memory in the desert Southwest.

Here's the incredible video:

Incredible Russian Dash Cam: Guy Tries To Get Back In Garage As Tornado Arrives

Things start to get way too stormy just after
a guy in Russia pulls out of his garage.  

There was a big tornado in Russia about a week and a half ago.

We now have a dash cam view that is probably one of the most remarkable videos I've seen of a tornado.

We see the view through the front windshield as the Russian driver backs out of a garage on a stormy day.

(Note: the time stamp on the video is incorrect. This was in late August)

Just as he pulls out onto the road, chaos erupts. It's a tornado!  Better get back into the garage!!!

Watch below what happens when he tried to do just that.

Spoiler:  Judging from the damage to the car and everything else around toward the end of the video, you wonder how he survived.

This is INCREDIBLE, though. Watch:

Scary: Houses Flying In Powerful Tornadoes

That large piece of debris on the right side
of this still from the Pilger, Nebraska tornado
is apparently a house.  

Remember that double tornado that hit and trashed the little town of Pilger, Nebraska earlier this month?  

When I saw videos of the tornado, I was struck by a huge piece of debris the tornado spat out as it tore through the town.

Analysis of the video shows that piece of debris was an entire house, or at least most of one.  

I wasn't able to confirm from any sources whether anyone was in the house when it sailed through the air.

There are pictures of a damaged house off its foundation, but I have doubts if it's the one that flew through the air. I'd think it would have disintegrated when it hit the ground.

This house in Bertram, Texas flew 100 feet through the
air during a tornado earlier this month.
The family inside suffered minor injuries.  

However, there was another recent, better documented case of a tornado that sent an occupied house flying.

 In early June, a house in Bertram, Texas flew 100 feet through the air during a tornado and landed 100 feet from its original location.

A family was inside, but the house was well constructed and ended up largely intact when the tornado ended. The family survived with minor injuries.

All this sounds like something out of the Wizard of Oz.

In a sense, the owners of these houses were lucky. Usually, homes disintegrate in a severe tornado, scattering possessions far and wide. The owners of these two homes were able to retrieve some of their belongings from the destroyed homes.

Here's what typically happens to a house in a strong tornado, in a surveillance video taken from a gas station during an Illinois tornado last November. (And it's amazing the gas station remained mostly intact)



Additionally, here's another video of the double tornado earlier this month in Nebraska. This one was not taken by a storm chaser, but a local resident. In some ways it's better than a storm chaser video. No yelling, no shaky cameras or blurry images of trying to catch up with a twister in a car.

This one is just a guy watching two terrifying tornadoes roar past him.

Amazing "Tree Trunk" Spinning Storm in Wyoming Sunday Is Tops In "Weather Porn"

Severe weather broke out in the High Plains of Montana, Wyoming and Nebraska Sunday.

The rough weather, which included a couple of small tornadoes, hit mostly remote, sparsely populated areas. The exception was Billings, Montana, which got some large hail.

But Sunday's biggest drama was the cloud you see in the photo. It was a spinning supercell in the middle of nowhere, basically, near Clareton, Wyoming.

I got it from Basehunters Chasing, who are storm chasers with a penchant for capturing beautiful, incredible Tornado Alley storms.

This is probably they're best shot yet. Find them: @basehunters via Twitter.

Also, click on their Facebook page for much more. 

The storm didn't produce a tornado, but it is surely one scary cloud. Like an alien mother ship ready to take over the world, or a giant elephant ready to stomp the hell out of us.

Basehunters were also kind enough to take this time lapse video of this supercell storm. Watch this incredible, high quality weather porn:





For good measure, here's a view of Sunday's hail storm in Billings, Montana:

Tumbleweed Connection: And Easterners Thought The Snow Accumulation Was Bad

Yes, I know, you winter weary achy backed snow shovelers in the Midwest and Northeast. You can't bear to clear one more flake of snow after shoveling your driveway day after day, week after week for months.  

A Colorado neighborhood buried in tumbleweeds
earlier this week. 

But it could be worse! Yes, it could!  You could live in the community of Fountain, near Colorado Springs.

Residents there returned home from work one day last week to find tumbleweeds piled up to 10 feet high against their houses. 

They couldn't get in or out.

These tumbleweeds have been a particularly terrible problem in windblown, drought stricken areas of the western United States this winter.

And what do you do with the mess? It's not like the tumbleweeds are going to melt eventually. Plus, they could catch fire and cause a nasty wildfire. The snow in your driveway is not going to cause a fire, trust me.

For now, the residents have piled the the tumbleweeds in a common area, but if the wind blows in the wrong direction, it could pile them against the houses again.

Tumbleweeds have become a real problem in the western United States this winter. They grew like crazy, especially in areas that got a lot of rain last summer. Then it got dry, and they're blowing around and piling up and getting to be a nasty headache.

You could burn them, but only if it's not dry or windy out.  The city of Kennewick, in eastern Washington suggests stomping them or using  heavy duty string trimmer to break them into bits so you can somewhat more easily dispose of them in the trash.

Some cities are spending weeks and many thousands of dollars with heavy equipment trying to get rid of the tumbleweed invasion, which is the worst in memory for a lot of Western towns.

It was as bad as it gets recently in Clovis, New Mexico, as you can see from this incredible local news vieo out of New Mexico:



Here's the local news clip from Colorado:

Great Tornado Video, But Not Smart Video Maker

Somebody took a great video of that tornado Friday in Wayne, Nebraska from inside a truck stop. (Vid is at the bottom of this post.)

Aerial view of destruction from Friday's Wayne,,
Nebraska tornado  

I'm not sure the person taking the video was so smart, standing there by the windows as the tornado began to tear the building apart. But what do I know?

Luckily, the tornado gave the truck stop only a glancing blow, so only parts of the building blew away.

Especially luckily, since the tornado clipped the building opposite from where the guy was shooting video.

The building held until halfway the video. The loud crashes as parts started to blow around finally prompted the people in the building to take shelter. But by the time they finally made it to a safer, windowless rest room  the tornado had pretty much passed.

I'm torn by this tornado video: Incredibly exciting to watch, but should we be encouraging people to be this unsafe by watching? Oh hell, let's watch the video. It's that good.

Forest Fire Terror: A Firenado

The Rocky Mountain states aren't the only areas on fire in the United States at the moment. There are some big forest fires going on in Alaska, too.

The big forest fire in Alaska  

Which resulted in the dramatic video in this post. It was taken from a plane flying at an elevation of about 1,900 feet above the fire.

The video shows basically a fire tornado. There are videos out there of these tight whirlwinds of fire in these conflagrations. But this fire whirl is essentially of the same scope and strength of one of those really big tornadoes you see in the Midwest every spring.

Here's a description from the Alaska Department of Forestry's Facebook page:

This footage was taken on August 16, 2013, on the Tetlin Junction Ridge Fire burning in the Tok area. The Alaska Division of Forestry firefighter that captured the footage has never seen anything like it in his 20 years of firefighting. It is the kind of fire behavior you hear about but can't really believe. "A picture probably is worth a thousand words, but there are indeed times when a picture just doesn't do it justice. I've never seen anything like it until now." - Tim Whitesell. Thanks to Tim and the pilot Doug Burts (together serving as an Aerial Supervision Module) for sharing this footage.

The type of fire tornado that you see in this video often are powerful enough to blow down trees before the fire gets to it. I imagine the winds associated with this Alaska fire tornado exceeded 100 mph.

As you can see, this fire was in a very remote area. Can you imagine if a fire tornado like this tore its way into a town?

Here's the vid: