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Huge Texas supercell storm captured in amazing timelapse by photographer who spent four years chasing phenomenon It doesn't take much to be reminded of the power of mother nature, but even at her most ferocious there can still be beauty. A spectacular video was captured by photographer Mike Olbinski near Booker, Texas, after four years of searching for such a stunning supercell thunderstorm.

Explanation: Is that a cloud or an alien spaceship? It's an unusual and sometimes dangerous type of thunderstorm cloud called a supercell. Supercells may spawn damaging tornados, hail, downbursts of air, or drenching rain. Or they may just look impressive. A supercell harbors a mesocylone -- a rising column of air surrounded by drafts of falling air. Supercells could occur over many places on Earth but are particularly common in Tornado Alley of the USA. Pictured above are four time lapse sequences of a supercell rotating above and moving across Booker, Texas. Captured in the video are new clouds forming...

JOPLIN, Mo. — A new engineering study of the damage caused by the May 2011 tornado that struck Joplin found no evidence that it was an EF5, as the National Weather Service found, because the city's homes and businesses weren't built to withstand wind speeds that strong, making such a determination impossible. The study by the American Society of Civil Engineers found that more than 83 percent of the damage on May 22, 2011, was caused by winds of 135 mph or less, which is equal to the maximum wind speed of an EF2 tornado, and that about 13 percent...

DENVER - The news of the deaths of storm chasers Tim Samaras, his son Paul Samaras, and veteran chasing partner Carl Young have stunned the storm chasing and weather science community and left many questions unanswered. How did this happen to one of the most cautious and safest storm chasers in the country? How did the team find themselves trapped in a tornado? What happened? "He was just caught up in a very unfortunate situation, where he was tracking a tornado and the tornado turned against him and there was no way he could get out from it," Tim's brother,...

(Editor’s note: Colin Flaherty has done more reporting than any other journalist on what appears to be a nationwide trend of skyrocketing black-on-white crime, violence and abuse. WND features these reports to counterbalance the virtual blackout by the rest of the media due to their concerns that reporting such incidents would be inflammatory or even racist. WND considers it racist not to report racial abuse solely because of the skin color of the perpetrators or victims.) Welcome to the new normal: Large-scale black mob violence is busting out in Philadelphia, Chicago, Utica, Jacksonville, St. Louis, Wilmington (Delaware), Greenville (South Carolina),...

A mysterious ice ball has appeared in Milovice forest in the Czech Republic, with some reports suggesting it could be an 'alien' object. The giant hailstone measures an impressive 2m in diameter, according to the Examiner, and a witness was able to take a video of the spectacle to pop up on YouTube. This supposed 'alien' ice block was discovered in the Czech Republic (YouTube) Judging by the shakiness of the film, the witness presumably believes it really could be some form of UFO, a view seemingly supported by the news provider, which received a tip-off about it from...

Footage from Taiwan's CTV. Reportedly seen from Peng-hu Islands. Explained as an instance of sundog. Some fear that this is a bad omen heralding "the end of the world."

After the sun sets on a summer evening and the sky fades to black, you may be lucky enough to see thin, wavy clouds illuminating the night, such as these seen over Billund, Denmark, on July 15, 2010. Clouds bright enough to see at night are not as hard to find as they once were. These so-called night-shining clouds are still rare — rare enough that Matthew DeLand, who has been studying them for 11 years, has seen them only once. But his odds are increasing. [Related: In Images: Reading the Clouds.] These mysterious clouds form between 50 and...

Bastardi's WagerA former National Weather Service meteorologist has a challenge for climate scientists. Joe Bastardi’s great love is atmospheric science. He says he’s been fascinated by it “since I was a baby. My dad’s a meteorologist, his great-grandfather was the town weatherman in Sicily, and my son wants to be a meteorologist.” And he’s disturbed by how the science, which he values for its own sake, has been infected with politics. According to Bastardi, the intelligentsia see new weather developments as an “incessant stream of confirmations” of global warming: “I just took out the New York Times from ten years...

A cloud that looked like a spaceship settled on Mount Shasta in the north state Wednesday morning, and then in the next hour spread out with a trailing edge to the south that looked like an exhaust plume. At Lake Tahoe in the central Sierra, after a crystal, cold morning with azure skies, wispy thin clouds, almost unnoticeable at some 30,000 feet, were cast like streamers. In both cases, the clouds predicted the weather to come. Nature has many crystal balls. If you want to know local weather on your adventures, look to the clouds. There are other signs as...

The debate over global warming has created predictable adversaries, pitting environmentalists against industry and coal-state Democrats against coastal liberals. But it has also created tensions between two groups that might be expected to agree on the issue: climate scientists and meteorologists — especially those who serve as television weather forecasters. Climatologists, who study weather patterns over time, almost universally endorse the view that the earth is warming and that humans have contributed to climate change. Meteorologists, who predict short-term weather patterns, are not so sure. Joe Bastardi, for example, a senior forecaster and meteorologist with AccuWeather, maintains that it is...

Global Warming: Russian analysts accuse Britain's Meteorological Office of cherry-picking Russian temperature data to "hide the decline" in global temperatures. Is Copenhagen rooted in a single tree in Siberia? Michael Mann, a Penn State meteorologist, wrote in Friday's Washington Post that "stolen" e-mails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit still don't alter the evidence for climate change. Mann, a creator of the discredited hockey-stick graph used in reports from the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to show man-made warming, attacks climate skeptics, including former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, saying they "confuse the public." Chutzpah has been...

Whipped into fantastical shapes, these clouds hang over the darkening landscape like the harbingers of a mighty storm. But despite their stunning and frequent appearances, the formations have yet to be officially recognised with a name. They have been seen all over Britain in different forms -from Snowdonia to the Scottish Highlands - and in other parts of the world such as New Zealand, but usually break up without producing a storm. And some experts believe the stormy weather phenomenon deserves its very own classification. Experts at the Royal Meteorological Society are now attempting to make it official by naming...

On March 20th, Danish photographer Jesper Gronne looked up at the clouds and saw not just one or two but three concentric halos around the sun. Before the rare display could fade, he grabbed his camera (a Canon 5D) and snapped more than 20 pictures. Stacking the images on his computer yielded a pin-up quality record of the event: I never expected to see such a rich variety of ice halos here in lowland Denmark--and it's not even winter anymore!" he marveled. What could cause such an apparition? Atmospheric optics expert Les Cowley explains: "We can work outwards from the...

A report about why global warming due to carbon dioxide is flawed hypothesis based off of crappy math models. Some of these guys are from the UN's IPCC who left because they so strongly disagreed. Oh, also to give you an idea of how many scientists that is compared to those who think global warming is occurring thanks to carbon dioxide: "The over 650 dissenting scientists are more than 12 times the number of UN scientists (52) who authored the media hyped IPCC 2007 Summary for Policymakers. " Here's the senate.gov link to where these quotes come from: http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.Blogs&ContentRecord_id=2158072e-802a-23ad-45f0-274616db87e6 Here...

A reader sent me a heads-up to an article in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society ($, abstract here) titled "Climate Change Education and the Ecological Footprint".  The authors express concern that non-science students don't sufficiently understand global warming and its causes, and want to initiate a re-education program in schools to get people thinking the "right" way.So, do climate scientists want to focus on better educating kids in details of the carbon cycle?  In the complexities in sorting out causes of warming between natural and man-made effects?  In difficulties with climate modeling?  In the huge role that feedback...

Are the ices of the Arctic north about to melt away for good? Rami Abdelrahman gets the views of a range of Swedish researchers. Sweden’s Crown Princess Victoria is one of a number of Scandinavian royals making for the Arctic archipelago on the Swedish ice-breaker Oden this weekend to participate in an event to coincide with and promote International Polar Year. But will there even be a need for such ice-breaking vessels in years to come? Many commentators would have us believe that glaciers and ocean ice are about to go the way of the dodo. Upon their arrival at...

So cold it's getting hot It may be cold, but CBC reassures us that calamity still loomsAh, the weather. It's cold as hell out there. How cold is it? It's so cold the CBC had to rush to assure all of us that global warming is still a big, big problem. With record snow falls, record cold snaps, the return of sea ice to the north, snow in the Middle East and a deep freeze in China, any sensible person might begin to wonder and even have doubts about global-warming theory and climate change. A little skepticism might begin to...

The overriding environmental issue of these times is the warming of the planet. The Democratic hopefuls in the 2008 campaign are fully engaged, calling for large — if still unquantified — national sacrifices and for a transformation in the way the country produces and uses energy. The Republicans do not go much further than conceding that climate change could be a problem and, with the notable exception of John McCain, offer no comprehensive solutions. In 2000, when Al Gore could have made warming a signature issue in his presidential campaign, his advisers persuaded him that it was too complicated and...

Chinese Regime Classifies Meteorological Information as State Secrets By Ren Zihui The Epoch Times Feb 06, 2007 The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) announced the official implementation of the "Regulation to Manage Meteorological Survey Data," which subjects weather information to tight controls. (Julian Finney/Getty Images for DAGOC))CHINA—In January, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) announced the official implementation of the "Regulation to Manage Meteorological Survey Data," which subjects weather information to tight controls. The new regulation stipulates that foreign individuals and organizations are prohibited from carrying out meteorological observations and establishing observatories in mainland China without permission. This regulation also applies to...