James Corden Gives An Epic "Stormy" Forecast

On The Late, Late Show, James Corden recently gave a television weather forecast. At first glance, you'd think it belongs on my sister blog "Matt's Weather Rapport" but nope, this is strictly poltical humor.

We have "Stormy Daniels" of course, looming long the East Coast, combining with a lot of hot air from Washington, meaning the forecast can't be good at all. But it is really funny. We'll let Corden take it from here:

Photography: Smoky, Hazy Sunset In St. Albans, Vermont Wednesday

Smoke from wildfires in Canada sent smoke and haze into northern Vermont yesteday. Not enough to choke you off, but enough to turn what would normally have been a bright, bluesky day into something a little murky.

I went up to the hill at the back of my house in St. Albans, Vermont to document the eerie, red, almost apocalyptic sunset. This post is in chronological order of the beauty I saw. Enjoy!

Winter, Spring..It Keeps Changing Within Minutes. I'm Confused

I found some lettuce growing in my garden
today. A little weird for northern Vermont at
the end of December.  

A couple weeks ago, we had an epic snowstorm where I live in St. Albans, Vermont.

Snowstorms are de rigueur in a Vermont December, of course.

This one was different. Instead of the nice, powdery, fluffy snow we're used to in Vermont, this was a wet slush coming down from the skies.

It had the consistency of wet cement. That wet cement snapped zillions of trees and cut power to a lot of people who live here. Some people had no power for a week.

With that snow, which piled up to about 16 inches deep in my yard, I figured winter was here to stay. At least until March.

Fast forward to the day or two after Christmas. Today.

It's been above freezing for a week, and daytime temperatures have gotten as high as the 50s.

Today, my yard looked like it normally does in the beginning of November. Or early April. Spring! 

And yes, I was weeding my garden today. In Vermont.
Go figure.  

So I acted like it was the beginning of November. Or April.

I finally got around to raking the autumn leaves. I weeded the garden. I found some tasty lettuce in the garden.  

I worked in a light jacket. I worked up a sweat.

At the end of December. When I should be freezing my tush off.

It's just strange that lately in Vermont, and here's the latest example, we don't have consistent seasons anymore.

Winter no longer last months. It hits for a week, goes away, comes back, goes away, comes back, etc. from October to May.

January comes in April, and April comes at the end of December. No wonder I'm confused. 

It was too wintry in November to get my autumn
raking done, but it was pleasantly warm at the end
of December, today, so I finally worked on it.  

I enjoyed the break from winter the past couple of days. Winter is my least favorite season.

But with the weather patterns lately, I just don't know what I'm supposed to be doing.

Should I be weeding and harvesting the garden on December 27, when normally at this time of year I'd be heading off into the mountains, with a couple feet of snow underfoot, to spend the day snowshoeing?

I guess I'll garden today, and postpone my snowshoeing expeditions to Memorial Day, when we'll probably get tons of snow. 

A Few Texas Boobs Object To The Word "Haboob" Because Arabic Words Are Un-American. Or Something.

There was a haboob in Texas the other day. For the uninitiated, a haboob is a dust storm, one that shows up as towering wall of dust that sweeps into a town or city as one giant wall of dirt.

Great aerial view of the haboob, or maybe
God's Holy Dust or something, in Texas.  

These kinds of things happen in arid west Texas sometimes.

The only especially odd thing about the whole thing was the morons who so, so object to the word "haboob"

See, haboob is an Arabic word for a sudden, giant duststorm.  Lots of words are derived from other languages. For instance, if an earthquake struck off the California coast and generated a giant wave that swamped coastal locations, we'd say the Golden State got hit by a tsunami.

Of course, tsunami is a Japanese word.

Japanese words are OK, apparently, to some West Texans. But an Arabic word? They're spoken by those heathen Muslims, who of course are all terrorists bent on America's destruction.

According to Gawker, television station KCBD in Lubbuck duly reported on the haboob, since it was a pretty big local news event. There were lots of dramatic photos of it, too, so the television station, quite sensibly, posted many of the pictures on its Web site.

But KCBD accurately called the storm a haboob. That's where the trouble started.

The comments the station got are priceless. Let's share some!

Judy Sumpter offered this: "Since when do we need to apply Muslim vocabulary to a good ole AMERICAN dirt storm? Did we move the country or what. I take great offence (sic) to such terminology! 

She goes on:.   "......Arabic means Arabs, and they are wanting to wipe America off the map. Therefore, I am still offended by the use of the term "haboob." Service men and women have paid the ultimate price fighting these people, and in my opinion, it is a dishonor for them."

I hate to interject logic here, but I will anyway. Sumpter would beg to differ, but actually most Muslims really don't have major problems with the U.S. Yes, there are some Muslim terrrorists who hate America, but they're a minority and I don't see how banning Arabic sounding words will change the minds of anti-American terrorists.

But maybe I'm just dense.

Speaking of dense, it gets worse. Some people left some wild Facebook comments on the television station's wall. Most were quickly taken down, but  Americans Against The Tea Party saved some of Facebook comments on the haboob "controversy" Here's some examples:

A gentleman named Jeff Bertrand remarked, "Never had a haboob until we got that muslim boob for POTUS"

Oh, such  play on words, Jeff! You're quite the clever linguist aren't you?

Another great view of the Texas haboob
last week. A few people object
to the word haboob because of its
Arabic origins. Most Texans rolled
their eyes at these objections.  

Deborah Wheeler weighed in: "Give me a break. It's called a dust storm. Texas is not a rag head country."

Um, Texas is a country? I thought it was a state, despite some Texans wish to secede. Just what is a rag head country? A place where people put cloths reeking of lemon-fresh scented Pledge after they dusted the furniture?

Wouldn't you want somebody to come in and dust the furniture after a haboob, er, sorry, good ole' American dirt storm?

Of course, if some Texans wanted to purge the language of Arabic words, they have a long list. "Algebra" is one, but judging from the comments above, the people who want to ditch the word "haboob" probably can't handle algebra anyway, so no great loss.

"Pajamas" is another Arabic word.  So sorry, Texans, throw the stuff you wear to bed at night in the garbage. It's too un-American.

Other words for weather that have been known to hit Texas have to go, too, because they're un-American. "Hurricane"comes from the word "Hurakan," a Caribbean god of evil. "Hurakon" was some sort of Mayan god.

Can't have hurricanes, then. Only references to Christianity, since this is a Christian nation, thank you.

Texas gets lots of tornadoes. That word comes from the 15th century, from the Spanish word "tronada" or thunderstorm.  With all those illegal aliens supposedly flooding across the Texas border, I guess we have to honor America and always refer to tornadoes as twisters or something.

To be fair, the people who objected to "haboob" on the KCBD page were clearly in the minority, and the overwhelming majority of smarter Texans piled on these idiots with their own Facebook comments.

I particularly loved a guy named Matt Martinez, who mockingly "agreed" we have to get rid of the word "tornado" because of its Spanish origins. He wrote "Round here we call it 'Freedom wind with plentiful victory bits'"

I don't know. My only last thought on this great Texas Haboob Word Crisis of 2014 is, what's the Arabic word for "stupid people"?

As Pothole Season Peaks On Roads, Two Photographers Have Awesome Fun With the Scourge

While I was driving around yesterday here in Vermont, I ended up with a headache from bouncing into up and over all the potholes and frost heaves left for us from a cold, changeable, schizophrenic winter.

A photo from the Luciano/Ficca
"My Potholes" series.  

It's been a wild winter in much of North America and city streets throughout much of the United States and Canada are showing it.

I wish I had a penny for every tire, suspension, shock absorber or alignment screwed up by running over the zillions of large, growing and multiplying potholes out there.

If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. Two photographers, David Luciano and Claudia Ficca did just that, roaming the streets of New York City, Los Angeles, Toronto and Montreal using potholes as a creative muse for all kinds of fun scenes.

Their project is called "My Potholes"  Nothing is photoshopped, according to the pair. They meticulously planned out the scenes, models, wardrobes and props.

This whole project reminds me the time a number of years ago when the "Pothole Bandit"  um, terrorized Burlington, Vermont, near where I live.

The bandit, fed up with all the potholes in Burlington during a tough winter, decided to get back at the city for its perceived lack of repairs by planting trees in the potholes.

Another image from the "My Potholes" series.  

In any event, you can ponder the Pothole Bandit and the "My Potholes" photo series while the mechanic fixes your pothole damaged car.

Now THIS Is How You Announce A School Closing

Another huge winter storm is spreading snow, inc, power failures, road closures and various other kinds of cold season hell across much of the country.

These guys don't look like members of the band Queen
but they channeled the band when they annouced
weather related school closings in Kentucky.  

Thousands of schools are closed because it's just too dangerous on the roads to get the kiddies to the classroom.

Boone County Schools in Kentucky decided to have a little fun with a school closing announcement the other day by channeling the band Queen to inform parents the kids would stay home because of a storm.

The school superintendent figured if they got some exposure from their antics, people might donate money to the cash strapped school district. Hey, you gotta try, right?

Here's the video of the principal and an assistant recording the announcement for school district parents.  Weird but fun.

Photobomb Storm: Weather Channel's Jim Cantore Stirs Up His Own High Pressure System

Lots of people are talking today about The Weather Channel's Jim Cantore's deft kick to the idiot who tried to photobomb him during a live broadcast in ice storm struck Charleston, South Carolina.

Jim Cantore, left, gives a moron a swift,
well deserved knee to the crotch.

It's so common, so cliched, so annoying to see morons try to gain attention during a reporter's live broadcast.

So it was nice to see Cantore's nonchalant but well aimed microburst of a knee to the kid's nether regions when the kid ran screaming into the live shot.

The forecast for this photobombing jerk: Dense brain fog, a wind chill advisory for the cold glance Cantore also gave him, and a tornado warning for the storm of media attention this idiot will get if he's identified. 

The kid didn't appear to get hurt, which is kind of too bad.  I wonder what his parents think of this national exposure of their idiot kid.

They must be so proud. 

Had he wanted to, Cantore is probably capable of doing some physical damage to somebody if he wanted to.

When I knew him in college he was a weight training and fitness buff, and judging from the tight shirts he sometimes wears on air, Cantore, at age 49, still finds his way into the gym now and then, to put it mildly. 

People call Cantore a bad ass anyway, because he always positions himself in the worst storms you can get. Everyone knows that if he shows up in your town, you're screwed. Because it means you are about to get the Storm From Hell. 

Cantore's arrival means you should be prepared for a 300 mph tornado in the middle of a hurricane that drops a blizzard with ten feet of snow, with the temperature plummeting to 200 below zero in the morning and rising to a high of 350 degrees in the afternoon. Throw in a dust storm, too. And locusts. 

We do need to make reporters' live shots more interesting. Especially when they're outside in terrible weather telling us the obvious: That's it's raining. Or windy. Or snowing. Or there's a tornado coming. 

So I think most television reporters and meteorologists should get training in mixed martial arts. Wouldn't it have been fun if Cantore, instead of just kneeing the idiot kid and letting it be, really went after him, in a supercell thunderstorm kind of way? With the kid returning the blows?

The fight would have been particularly fun to watch with all that ice underfoot from the storm Cantore was reporting on.  A combination of Olympic ice dancing figure skating with World Wrestling Entertainment. 

For what it's worth, here's the video clip of Cantore's debut as an MME champ:

How To Humiliate Those Jerks Who Blame Disasters On Gay Marriage

A weird conservative politician in Britain named David Silverster attempted a tried and true response to the recent passage of gay marriage legislation in that country.

A storm slams Britain in December. A local
politician blames the bad weather on the
gays, as always, which has led to some
hilarious mocking. 

Silverster said devastating December storms and floods in Britain were God's wrath for gay marriage. Religious wackos have used that line in the United States for years.

In the United States, we just roll our eyes at such stupidity. But we should take a page from Britain, where comics and wiseguys invented their own weather forecasts to mock Silvester.

On person Tweeted:

Tonight for the first time
Just about half-past ten
For the first time in history
It's gonna start raining men. 

Of course, that's lyrics from the 1980s song "It's Raining Men" by the Weather Girls, which is particularly popular among many gay people. 

So many people have latched on to this song since Silvester made his dumb comments that the tune might once again reach Number 1 on the charts in Britain next week. 

Martha Wash, who was a vocalist for the Weather Girls, is not surprisingly, just fine with this.

"I'm flattered that after all these years, the song is still relevant (event if it is for storms and floods)" she wrote in an email  

Dean Burnett, writing in The Guardian, wrote a mock science article that indicated Sylvester had a point, because maybe gay marriage was disrupting local weather patterns and worsening global warming, which in turn was causing weather extremes:

"Logically, same sex marriage leads to an increase in the number of wedding. Weddings invariably involve a large number of people congregating in one place, which leads to a lot of body heat and warming, and this heat enters the atmosphere, increasing the air temperature and producing more warm fronts.

People also cry a lot at weddings. This likely to be even more pronounced at same sex weddings, with the added element of recently achieved equality making the events even more poignant. 

Tears are basically water, which quickly evaporate, thus adding to the water content of the atmosphere.

Weddings also typically involve a lot of alcohol, which makes people colder, meaning they're more likely to turn on heating systems when they arrive home, releasing more heat and CO2 into the atmosphere."

Finally, actor Nicholas Pegg did a deadpan mockup of a Serious Official Shipping Forecast that the BBC regularly broadcasts to a large audience in Britain.

In Pegg's high seas forecast, he warned of "Gays at Viking, Southeast Iceland and Bongo Bongo land" and alerted mariners to the risk of "homophobic outbursts, back peddling westerly and becoming untenable."

So, the next time some right wing wacko in the United States blames the gays for the inevitable spring tornado outbreak in the Midwest, we should be ready with our own forecasts.

I suggest using the song "Tornado" by Little Big Town, with the lyric, "I'm a tornado looking for a soul to take."  

 

Fun With Boiling Water, Water Guns And Extreme Cold

I suppose it was inevitable that a bunch of videos would surface of people playing water in the extreme cold that's hitting much of the United States and southeastern Canada.

Here's a fun one of somebody shooting boiling water out of a water gun in an air temperature of 42 below in Ontario:

What else are you going to do when it's cold?

Nice Afternoon Light For A November Windstorm

This afternoon up in St. Albans, Vermont, we had a TON of wind. I'd say it gusted to at least 50 mph.

Trees in my yard in St. Albans, Vermont, are tossed in strong,
50 mph wind gusts as they are lit up in a golden color by
the setting sun.  Beautiful!  

Toward evening, the setting sun lit up the trees rocking in the gales.

I took a quick iPhone video of it. It's not the greatest quality but you get the idea of the dramatic beauty of the brightly lit storm.

(I also took some video with my higher quality Canon Rebel camera, but I haven't had a chance to look to see if that video is workable yet.

Anyway, here's the iPhone video to give you an idea. I love light and drama. Hope you do to.

Extremely Scary Tornado Video Out of Italy, Of All Places

As you know, I love weather porn, defined as videos or images of really bad storms or really horrible weather that ads some excitement to the day.

A tornado touching down near Milan, Italy
yesterday.  

There was an odd outbreak of tornadoes near Milan, Italy, of all places yesterday. It seems everybody in and near Milan shoots videos, so there's lots of images of the storms.

My favorite and scariest one is a view out of a corner office window as a tornado comes through.

The person who shot the video is lucky. The windows could have easily shattered and high speed broken glass and debris could have shredded the poor guy.

As you watch the video, notice at the end it cuts off abruptly. It's clear he thought he was in danger and fled. He was right. But he survived to give us a very unique view out of his office window on a day that turned out to be anything but dull.

If you ever get a tornado, don't try this at home, OK?

Watch and be amazed, as you will be even if you're not that into weather porn.

(EDITORS NOTE: Person who took the original video, which I posted here 8 a.m July 30, was taken down. I replaced it with an RT tornado report that includes most of the orginal video.)

Best EVER Time Lapse Of A Big Thunderstorm

Time lapse videos are all the rage on YouTube nowadays.

Thunderstorms have been the dominant weather news in the country this summer, as they spark epic flash floods, the lightning starts epic forest fires and we deal with lots of rain and lightning, both here in Vermont and in most of the rest of the country this year.

Combine the two, and you can get some awesome videos, especially if you are a weather geek, a camera geek and a video geek.

A recent storm in Madison, Wisconsin was captured on a rooftop at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

As the notes on the YouTube video say, note the clouds going in different directions near the beginning of the video, which seems to indicate volatile weather. And as the storm reaches peak intensity, watch that lightning.

So very cool!

Another Storm in Vermont, More Dramatic Photographs

The endless parade of big, destructive thunderstorms plaguing Vermont this summer continued last night as another squall line came through, tossing down God knows how many trees and power lines as it roared across the northern half of the state last night.

As clouds began to gather, it gave the atmospher a tropical
feel as people got the last of their fishing in.  

It seems the power companies are always out untangling their fallen lines, chain saws are constantly buzzing and everybody is always shoring up the roads washing out in the downpours.

Last evening, I was at St. Albans Bay, on Lake Champlain in northern Vermont when the storms came through.

The blast of clouds, wind and lightning didn't cause much damage around St. Albans, but it sure made for some great photos.

Ahead of the storm the sun's rays struggled
against the oncoming dark clouds 

The shelf cloud in front of the storm looks like Jaws
ready to eat the bay.  

The storm gets closer, the sky gets darker

The shelf cloud visible as the storm approached and a sign the storm would pack a punch,  was something to behold.

The roiling storm clouds take over the sky.

The storm takes over. I run inside.

The storm doesn't last long, and the sky gets
peaceful again at sunset.  

Taking A Ride In a Mudslide, And A Tornadic Pikes Peak. Weather Drama in Colorado

I drove through lots of flash flooding here in Vermont over the past month and a half, but luckily did not drive in deep water, or accidentally encounter water that was too deep.

Or if I did encounter flooding that looked unsafe, I turned around and found another way to get where I was going.

This is a view of a car being swept away by a Colorado
mudslide. Watch video below to see what it looked
like from inside the car.  

Out in Colorado, though, the flash flood water came up way too fast for a guy in his car to get out of the way.

It was on a mountain road, near the site of a really bad forest fire last year.

When it rained, it swept all kinds of mud and black debris from the fire onto the road. That's why the flowing water you will see in the video is black.

This guy somehow managed to somewhat calmly narrate from inside the car as the black flash flood sweeps him along.

It ended OK, though. His car's trashed, but he's fine. Watch:



Meanwhile, way up above 14,000 feet at Pike's Peak. Colorado, you'd think you'd be out of Tornado Alley. You'd be wrong, judging from the video by LaRae Gallant shot this weekend.



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Amazing Aerial Photo of Trail of Hail Left By Big Storm

In a photo by pilot Daryl Frank, a streak of hail
is left behind by a thunderstorm in Alberta 

Santa Rosa, New Mexico recently found itself getting a lot of weather publicity after a storm left it covered by more than a foot of hail,  making it look like they'd had an enormous July 4 weekend snowstorm.

But I  found an even more spectacular  photo on TVNweather.com,'s Facebook page, showing an  aerial view of farmland in Alberta, Canada after a hailstorm.

The photo was apparently take by a Catp. Daryl Frank of Jazz Aviation. The path of the hail streak resembles that left by a tornado. But instead of wind destruction, you get this bizarre streak of white in otherwise green agricultural lands.

(Click on the photo to make it bigger and get a better view)

But I imagine the crops under all that hail didn't fare too well. That hail had to be intense to leave an accumulation like that.

Here's a video of what the hail storm looked like while it was in progress. Yikes!

Scenes From A Vermont Flood

For more than a month now, torrents of rain have been pouring onto Vermont. There's been repeated, damaging floods.

The storm clouds roll in at around 1 p.m. on
the Fourth of July

Even those that have not experienced any flood damage are suffering. Crops are drowning. Mosquitoes are thriving. People are sick of being wet.

On the Fourth of July, one of the worst storms yet in this episode of rainy weather swept into northern Vermont, and we had another, yes, another flash flood. It's getting old. The photos in this post are scenes from this Vermont flood.

The heavy rain quickly overwhelms roads, in this case, i
in Jericho, Vermont.  

 This four foot deep swimming
pool in Richmond, Vermont
was overwhelmed by
flooding.

Residents of Jericho try to
control the effects of flowing
water and mudslides  

This road in Jericho is closed for
a long time.

After doing their damage, the
thunderstorms depart, glowing in
the Fourth of July sunset.  

Vermont's Weather Is Horrible, But The Clouds Are Interesting

It's been a terribly stormy week in Vermont. Amid high humidity, thunderstorms have erupted and rain has poured down  every day.

Dramatic thundestorm clouds up the
road from my St. Albans, Vermont home
this week.  

There's been flash floods, high water, lightning, wind, hail, and not much sun.  Summertime in Vermont!

This Friday morning, we're all grateful that it's only raining kind of hard. You take what you can get. They'd forecasted an epic flood for us today but we only got minor bits of high water.  So I suppose we're lucky.

They're telling us this wet weather will last several more days. Each day, somebody, some town in Vermont will get a flash flood from a heavy thunderstorm, we're told. We don't know where. It's the luck of the draw.

Houses on some unlucky street in Vermont will have water pouring into their basements, while their neighbors a couple miles away will be taking items off the clothesline because it is starting to sprinkle. Just random.

At least some of the clouds have been interesting. Monday night, a thunderstorm rapidly approached my house in St. Albans. Vermont. Judging from the clouds, it looked like my luck would run out. Would there be a tornado? Hurricane force winds? A flood?

Nah. Just some dramatic clouds, a few grumbles of thunder, a cooling breeze and a brief downpour. I got lucky again. And I got some good cloud photos, as you can see in the post.

Another view of dramatic storm clouds near
my St. Albans, Vt. home this week.

Also, here at the bottom of this blog post thingy, is a video I took of those clouds coming over my house Monday night. I was really glad I was able to watch them.

Aerial View of Storm That Caused Ugly, Deadly Tornado is Beautiful

Tom Magnuson, who works at the National Weather Service office in Pueblo, Colorado, said he took this photo from an airplane of the thunderstorms that would unleash the huge tornado in El Reno, Oklahoma last week.

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

He said the tornado was just getting ready to form, he thinks, when he took this picture. The tornado turned out to be one of the strongest on record, and also the widest on record, reaching 2.6 miles across at one point

The storm was of course incredibly violent, but from the air it looks peaceful.  At least at first glance.

Magnuson says the top of the anvil,  that big cloud that points to the right on the top of the thunderstorm,  is bumpy on top, because the updrafts were so extreme ---100 mph --- that it made the top of the storm look bubbly as the wind roared upward. Usually the tops of thunderstorms are pretty smooth.

And a close look at the clouds beneath that anvil silently testify to the roiling winds in the storm that would soon release the deadly tornado.

Still, from the air, with the soothing blue and white hues, and the soft features of the clouds, you'd think you're looking at somebody's dream. Instead, you're looking at Oklahoma's nightmare.

Thought This Would Happen: Tornado Chasers Run Over by Tornadoes

I heard some sad news today that three professional storm chasers were among the nine people killed by the tornadoes that swept through Oklahoma Friday.

A big Oklahoma tornado about to send a vehicle
containing a Weather Channel chase team flying  

Three other storm chase vehicles got caught in tornadoes, including one with the Weather Channel's Mike Bettes, who suffered relatively minor injuries.

I knew this would happen eventually. I think everyone who knows anything about storm chasing realized this would happen.

There's been an arms race of sorts, with people getting closer and closer to tornadoes,  or even inside them, taking more and more dramatic videos that the public eats up, thereby making plenty of money from their videos.

As a weather geek, I admit I'm one of those who loves those storm videos.  But the whole concept of storm chasing has gotten out of control in recent years. Dozens of chasers regularly converge on large tornadoes, causing traffic jams that would make it hard to escape if the tornado changed directions.

And tornado chasers have been getting involved with increasingly volatile weather situations. Friday's Oklahoma tornadoes were especially sudden and erratic, popping up abruptly and changing directions without rhyme or reason.

Interestingly and tragically, the chasers who died, Tim Samaras, 55, his son Paul Samaras, 24, and Carl Young, 45, were reportedly some of the more safe chasers, a trio who didn't take as many chances as others.

Details on what happened are sketchy. The tornadoes were acting so far out of the ordinary that they might have been caught off guard. Or, they had an escape route but the roads were so clogged with cars that they were trapped.

Cars tossed around in Friday's Oklahoma tornadoes.
Cars are the worst place to be in tornadoes.
Photo by Jim Beckel, The Oklahoman.  

Adding greatly to the traffic woes was some very bad advice some Oklahoma City media outlets gave to the public:  Try to outrun the tornado in your car.  That's the worst thing you could do, as vehicles are easily flung by tornadic winds, and cars stuck in traffic jams surely are not going to outrun a tornado.

Even a building with no basement, which is common in Oklahoma, are much safer than cars.

We were also subjected this week to the aforementioned Mike Bettes of the Weather Channel being tossed about by a tornado, a another storm chaser being smashed up by a farm disintegrating in a tornado and a local television station's storm chasers getting caught in 100 mph winds on the edge of another twister.

The YouTube video of the chasers getting hit by the farm debris had racked up 500,000 hits within two days of it being posted, which demonstrates the popularity of these dramatic videos.

There have been other close misses among storm chasers in recent days. One chase team got themselves caught inside a very strong Kansas tornado last week, but survived to give triumphant television interviews on the morning news and talk shows.

Television networks eat up these dramatic tornado videos, too. It's great for the ratings.

I don't know if this will change the risks tornado chasers take. It's big business, and money talks. You can take vacation trips in which the general public can chase tornadoes for a week.

I chase the admittedly much milder storms where I live in Vermont myself.  I don't think I take too many unnecessary risks. I won't drive over flooded roads. In the rare cases when we have potentially tornadic supercells, I try to avoid getting myself in the middle of these storms.

But, like so many others, I'm fascinated by big storms, both the garden variety ones in Vermont or the giant ones in Oklahoma.

We have to remember to be careful, but human nature makes it such that some of us will get too close. To our great peril.

"Weather Whiplash" A New Hazard, It Seems

I've been hearing the term "weather whiplash" bandied around lately, considering how the weather seems to be shifting in all kinds of weird directions and incredibly abruptly.

It can happen in a day, like the time last month went from 90 degrees to a freeze and snow within 12 hours.

High water cascades over a falls in Fairfax, Vermont
as the state has gone from near-drought to damaging
flood in less than a week  

The Midwest has been classic, going from major flooding, to major drought back to major flooding again from 2011 and 2013.

We just experienced this whiplash here in Vermont. It has been quite dry, and it looked as if we were headed toward a drought just a few days ago.

Now, we've got a destruction flash flood, and it's supposed to rain, a lot, over the next three days, raising fears of more flooding.

It seems every year now, we in Vermont get a storm that wipes out a bunch of roads and bridges.

Now it's happened again.

We had midsummer humidity yesterday and the day before. Today, it's a March-like 45 degrees, and it might snow in the mountains this weekend. Yes, Memorial Day weekend, the unofficial start of summer.

We used to say if you don't like the weather in Vermont, wait a minute and it will change. Now, I guess you have to say if you don't like the weather anytime, anywhere, wait a minute, it will become more extreme.

What's next for Vermont? Dust storms and tidal waves?