Excellent Time Lapse of Australian Severe Thunderstorm

Many of us in the United States are still shivering in winter weather, waiting for the spring and summer thunderstorm season.

To whet your appetite, here's some time lapse of a severe thunderstorm that rolled through Sydney, Australia earlier today. Awesome shelf cloud on the front side of that storm!

The videos came from the Canberra Times.

One Of Strongest March Cold Waves in U.S. History Continues

This cold wave across much of the nation and southeastern Canada is one for the record books. It's been awhile since a number of U.S. cities set not just daily record low temperatures, but record lows for an entire month.

In this visible satellite image taken above
the Texas/Oklahoma border yesterday, those whitish
streaks you see are bands of sleet accumulated
on the ground, left by strong thunderstorms
Sunday that happened in near record cold air.  

That happened this week. We already mentioned the 21 below in Billings, Montana the other day. 

Now it's the East Coast's turn. Fresh snowpack in the Mid-Atlantic states from yesterday followed by clear skies last night set the stage for some incredible cold for this time of year.

Baltimore, Md. got down to 4 degrees above zero, setting a new low for March. The old record was 5 degrees in 1873 (!!)

Charlottesville, Virginia and Dover, Delaware also set record lows for the month of March. 

Down in the Houston, Texas area this morning, winter storm warnings were flying because of freezing rain. That's happening in a place with a normal low of 50 and a normal high of 70 this time of year.

For my friends here in Vermont, the freezing rain in Houston is the same depressing extreme as if we had an ice storm on Memorial Day weekend.

Up in central and northern Quebec some of lowest temperatures on Earth were reported this morning, with readings in some spots near 50 below.

This incredible cold is part of that extreme jet stream pattern that has plagued much of the northern hemisphere since before the start of winter.

A huge area of higher pressure has caused a band of incredible warmth from California, north through western Canada in Yukon, Alaska and on up to near the North Pole, and even over to Greenland at times.

Then, the jet stream heads back south, coming from the North Pole and blasting south into the eastern half of the United States. There's usually curves to the north and south in the jet stream, but not often to the extremes we've seen this winter.

The Climate Prediction Center outlook through March 17
shows continued deep chill in the eastern U.S.
with more warmth in the West and in Alaska.

The remarkable thing about this pattern is how persistent it has been. It's been going on with only brief breaks since about the end of November. Usually things change around a bit, but not this year.

Up until this week, the cold has been intense, but not unprecedented. But now that it's persisted into March, we got a true record cold snap.

The persistence of the weather pattern has meant a few places in the Midwest, particularly in Wisconsin and and Michigan,  had their coldest winter on record. 

Meanwhile, under the warm western ridge, Las Vegas had its warmest winter on record, as did a few towns in Alaska.

The extreme jet stream that has set up this pattern shows no sign of breaking down much for the rest of March. The cold will relax, of course, as the next batches of cold air from Canada won't be as frigid.

Also, as the month goes along, it will have to warm up some, only because the cold will ease in tandem with the rise in normal temperatures this time of year.

However, for the Midwest and Northeast, it looks like we're in for a delayed spring, with below normal temperatures likely most days through the month of March.

I have no idea when this weather pattern will become "unstuck" from the way it's been. It makes you worry it's permanent, but of course that's not the case. 

We'd better have a nice warm rest of the year to make up for the first three months of 2014, though. 

Very Strange Winter Storm in Midwest Had Incredible Lightning Sunday.

For some reason, over the past couple of years, a surprising number of winter storms in the United States have spat out lightning and "thunder snow"

James Menzies of @UKStormChaser on Twitter captured

these incredible cloud to ground lightning bolts amid

sleet and snow Sunday near Norman, Oklahoma.  

The one crossing the nation now really takes the cake. Huge swaths of Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and other areas had a lot of thunder and lightning as heavy sleet fell.

Sleet was the predominant precipitation in that area, though some thunderstorms also had freezing rain or snow.

Usually, thunder in winter storms comes from so called "elevated" thunderstorms.  The cold air near the earth's surface has undercut the warm air thunderstorms usually thrive on.

So the thunderstorms develop a little higher up in the atmosphere than they normally do, up in the warm air that's on top of the thin layer of chill near the ground. In these cases,  most of the lightning is up high, crackling between the clouds. Some strikes hit the ground, but not many.

This winter weather system had a number of storms with lots of lightning strikes hitting the ground. Some were actually quite severe, and you had the spectacle of hail the size of quarters mixing with the deluge of sleet pellets beneath the thunderstorm.

A strange weather event indeed.

Here's what it looked like on the ground:  Quarter sized hail causing damage amid just a torrential downpour of sleet in the midst of the storm, which also brought lightning and thunder to this area.

March A Harbinger Of Spring? Ha! Winter Intensifies Even More

Now that March has arrived,  you'd think that winter would loosen it's grip just a teeny, tiny bit.

But, even after the sharp cold waves and destructive winter snow and ice storms we've dealt with since December, things are actually getting worse, if anything.

From WAVY, the big highway pileup in the
snow Saturday in Denver.  

A massive winter storm is sweeping the nation coast to coast. Since it's March, elements of spring are trying to mix in with the wintry mess.

The result is the strange, strange phenomenon of strong thunderstorms with pretty good sized hail while there's freezing rain falling with a temperature of just below 32 degrees in parts Oklahoma and Arkansas.

And shouldn't it be warming up in Oklahoma and Arkansas by now? As of 11 a.m. their time on Sunday, it was 13 degrees in Oklahoma City. On March 2, the normal high temperature there is 59 degrees and the normal low is 37.

Speaking of cold, Billings, Montana, reported its coldest March temperature on record this morning with a reading of 21 below.

In Missoula, Montana, an avalanche swept off a steep hill in a blizzard and down into a neighborhood, demolishing a house and burying three people.

At least report, the three had been dug out of the snow and were hospitalized.

In Denver, snow rapidly iced up a freeway, causing another one of those massive car and truck pileups we've seen this winter. This time, one person died, about 30 were injured and more than 100 vehicles were involved. 

So it's really grim and wintry out there.

Scenes like this might be common from the Oklahoma to
Maryland by Monday as a huge winter storm heads
east across the nation.  

This storminess and cold isn't going to get much better soon.  A damaging ice storm is on its way for tonight in parts of the Ohio Valley. (Haven't we had enough damaging ice storms for one winter?)

It's fairly warm in the nation's Mid-Atlantic region now, but freezing rain, then a lot of snow is due tomorrow.  This could end up being among the largest March snowstorms on record in Washington, DC.

The big winter storm will miss northern New England, but Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine aren't getting a break, either. Temperatures will be well below zero each night through Wednesday.

Record lows are likely the next few nights in some towns from the northern Plains to New England.

It's as if that weather pattern that set up late last fall that repeatedly brings Arctic air from the North Pole into the United States has become semi-permanent. It's very frustrating.

It'll probably turn less cold over much of the nation toward the end of the week, but it won't exactly be mild or springlike anywhere, except maybe in the western third of the country and in the Deep South.

In the Northeast, long range forecasts don't give any real sign of springlike weather through the next three weeks.

Yes, this whole post looks like it was written by Gloomy Gus, but this year is just the (bad) luck of the draw.

Spring, especially in the Northeast seems as if it will range somewhere between reluctant and nonexistent this year.  We can always console ourselves by thinking back to March 2012, when we had weeks of record heat in March.

And maybe next year will be better.

More California Storm Videos: Huge Tree Vs. Much Smaller House, Huge Waves, Strange Blow Hole

We have yet another "weather porn" video of the storm in California. This time, a huge wind gust hits an enormous tree, which wasn't good for a not-as-enormous house. No major injuries in this one, either, fortunately.




Meanwhile, in Santa Cruz, huge waves and high tides smashed into a coastal neighborhood, resulting in this odd scene captured on video. The waves blasted into a crevasse under the house, and formed a really cool blow hole in the driveway on the side of the houe opposite the storm-blasted beach.

Cool to watch:

California Storm Video:: Huge Wave Smashes Through Restaurant

Among the problems that big storm in California is causing is storm surges and big waves along the coast.

Some good videos are coming out. (But when, oh when will people learn how to avoid "vertical screen syndrome" on smartphones. Hold the damn thing horizontally!!)

Watch what happens at a seaside Santa Barbara restaurant. No serious injuries were reported.

"Time to go!"

If You Think This Winter In Vermont Was Tough, You're Just Out of Practice

Generally speaking, meteorologists like to regard winter as the period from December 1 to February 28 (Or February 29 in leap years)

It looks like Jackson the Weather Dog is
ready for spring after a (sort of) cold Vermont winter. 

The three months are normally the coldest of the year, so it makes sense to partition them that way.

The bottom line in Vermont?   Be prepared to be unimpressed. It wasn't that bad. The National Weather Service says out of the past 100 winters, 2013-14 was the 58th coldest.

We haven't had a winter this "bad" since.... wait for it......2009!

Yeah, yawn.

The problem is, we've grown soft. The winter of 2013-14 was only 1.3 degrees colder than normal. But  the previous winter was 3.5 degrees warmer than normal. And the winter before that was a whopping 5.8 degrees warmer than average.

So we're not used to the cold.

Also this winter, precipitation was just a little above normal, and snowfalls is running just a little below normal in Vermont.  So despite some occasional extremes, it all averaged out to be, well, pretty much average.

It was much colder in parts of the Midwest.  The winter of 2013-14 made the Top 10 list of coldest winters in several cities.   For instance, Chicago and Minneapolis had their 9th coldest winters on record. Dubuque, Iowa suffered through it's third coldest winter.

So far, I haven't found any place that had its coldest winter on record.

Some areas of the Midwest and Northeast are also experiencing one of their snowiest winters on record.

March, of course, is starting off wintry in much of the nation. There's coast to coast winter storm watches, warnings and advisories from Washington State, through the Midwest to New Jersey.

It's also very, very cold from the northern Plains to New England.

For the winter weary areas of the Northeast and Midwest, I see little sign of a big warmup in March.  Long range forecasts are always unreliable, but reading the tea leaves, I do see glimmers of hope for the strange people out there who actually love record cold.

There's a slight, very slight chance some people in the Midwest and Northeast could see their coldest March on record. Or at least scoring in the Top 10 coldest Marches.

For me, I could live without such records. I wouldn't mind seeing a warmer than normal March around my place in Vermont. I'm ready for gardening!