AccuWeather's 'Weather Permitting' photo blog: Interesting pics of the weather -- when the weather permits. All photos are used with permission.
JKim Winn took photos of strangely smooth, wavy clouds in Duluth, Minnesota, and posted them on the Facebook group "Cloud Appreciation Society" on April 16, 2024. It turns out that this is a classification of clouds that was missing from the official cloud atlas.
In 2017, after a suggestion by a cloud photographer eight years earlier, "Asperitus Undulatus," or Asperitus for short, became the first new cloud type to be added to the International Cloud Atlas since 1951. The cloud is often seen on the edge of rainfall, where moist air mixes sharply with dry air.
AccuWeather meteorologist and storm chaser Tony Laubach was treated to quite the lightning show in southeast Nebraska on the night of April 15, 2024. The photos were taken near Lincoln and Greenwood.
"These little cells were popping out bolts like mad," Laubach wrote on Facebook. "The bolts-per-minute with these cells was easily approaching 5-10. This was one of the best lightning photo nights since 2019. I haven't had a haul like this in a long time."
Impressive lightning bolts don't necessarily correspond with severe storms, which Laubach typically pursues. That turned out to be a good thing Monday night, he said, since lightning photography requires standing still. When he is not worried about chasing tornadoes, he can stay in one place.
Although lightning can strike during any month in Lincoln, Nebraska, blockbuster shots like these came a little early this spring. The historical probability of seeing one lightning strike is just over 19 percent on April 15, according to the Storm Prediction Center. That number increases to a peak of 42 percent by June 21.
A bolt of lightning struck the Statue of Liberty’s torch in a stunning photo captured on April 3.
Dan Martland captured lightning striking the Statue of Liberty in New York City on April 3, 2024. With multiple cameras, he was able to photograph the iconic landmark being struck at several different zoom levels.
On his Instagram page, Martland shows Lady Liberty in a number of other colorful weather situations with sunrises, sunsets, and the moon.
After working as a photographer in England, Martland moved to the United States in 2007. One of his friends was quoted as saying, “He is a great example of a daredevil Brit living the American dream -- and getting some really impressive results in the process.”
The Statue of Liberty was not in the top 10 U.S. buildings struck by lightning in 2023, but it does get hit by lightning multiple times each year.
An Associated Press photographer captured unique and colorful photos this week of Iceland’s erupting volcano with the northern lights shining overhead.
The stunning pictures were taken by Marco di Marco, a self-proclaimed "volcano chaser" near the town of Grindavik, Iceland, on March 23 and 25, 2024. An equally stunning video timelapse is also available from the event. This is the fourth eruption in the Fagradalsfjall volcano region in southern Iceland since December.
Our eyes perceive these photos as particularly beautiful because the orange-red lava and blue-green sky contain complementary colors that create "color harmony" according to the science of color theory.
Photographer Brian Lotze grew up in Washington state but it was always his dream to live in Alaska. Now he does, and he and his daughter go on photography trips to find amazing natural wonders. On March 14, 2024, they drove 150 miles south from Fairbanks, Alaska, to visit the caves at Castner Glacier.
After a mile hike to the cave, what they saw inside was hard to believe. Ice crystals, everywhere, of different shapes and sizes. Some were two feet long and spiky, some hexagonal and small enough to hold in your hand. A photograph of his daughter posed next to the crystals on Facebook offers some scale for the larger displays.
Lotze explained how the ice crystals formed, saying, "They are caused by proximity to the entrance, variation in airflow, and variation in moisture flow. The process is exactly the same as occurs in the small cavities I find on creeks and ponds but on a massive scale."
Although it is not a park, the Federal Bureau of Land Management is considering making it an official recreation area due to an uptick in visitation in recent years.
On Lotze's Patreon page, subscribers can get high-resolution versions of his photos.
He worries that climate change will eventually bring an end to Castner and others like it, saying on Facebook, "What I worry about is what will be left in a few years to view. Other glaciers up here have receded great distances in the last 50 years," he noted.
Seung Hye Yang was photographing the Aurora Borealis from Iceland on March 12, 2024, when a strange spiral suddenly appeared in the sky, and then disappeared as quickly as it formed. Had Yang just witnessed a portal through space to another dimension? No, this presentation had Earthly origins.
The Astronomy Picture of the Day website explains, "What's that over the horizon? What may look like a strangely nearby galaxy is actually a normal rocket's exhaust plume -- but unusually backlit. Although the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket was launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, USA, its burned propellant was visible over a much wider area, with [this] featured photograph being taken from Akureyri, Iceland."
"Like noctilucent clouds, the plume's brightness is caused by the 'twilight effect,' where an object is high enough to be illuminated by the twilight Sun, even when the observer on the ground experiences the darkness of night. The spiral shape is caused by the Falcon rocket reorienting [rotating] to release satellites in different directions. Stars and faint green and red aurora [also] appear in the background of this extraordinary image."
"This is how it dawns in Utah!"
Manuel Gonzalez Romero posted these words with this amazing sunrise photo in Springville, Utah, on Feb. 19, 2024. Springville is known as "Art City" and is home to the Springville Museum of Art, the oldest museum for the visual fine arts in the state.
The town of 35,000 people backs up against the Wasatch Mountain Range, as showcased in the photo above. At 4,500 feet elevation, the weather in Springville is cold, but not too cold -- about the same as New York City. In Summer, high temperatures in Springville can top 100 degrees.
Death Valley National Park is the largest, hottest, and driest National Park in the continental U.S. Except now, it has a lake, thanks to heavy rain that started after Hurricane Hilary in August and was boosted most recently by an atmospheric river in early February.
Visitors are kayaking in the 6-mile-long lake, informally known as Lake Manly, and sitting in chairs on its shore. Photographers have come from all over the world to document the lake with sunsets and reflections of the surrounding snowy mountains.
Temporarly lakes were also created in Death Valley in 2019 and 2015 after heavy rainfall, but haven't lasted as long as Lake Manly.
Death Valley is known for holding the official highest temperature ever measured on Earth, 134 degrees F, recorded on Jul 10, 1913.
A larger annual rainfall in the Death Valley area has created a 6-mile-long lake at the national park, in which parkgoers are kayaking and enjoying.
On Valentine's Day, the Special Enforcement Bureau of the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department received a distress call from the Mt. Baldy area. At 9,000 feet elevation, six hikers were unable to continue their hike due to harsh conditions. The SEB's helicopter "Air Rescue 5" responded with medics and airlifted the hikers to safety just after this photo of the helicopter was taken, showing the scenic splendor of the mountain.
Only five miles away, overlooking the Los Angeles metro area, Mt. Baldy seems like an achievable and rewarding hike to residents and visitors alike. Still, the scenic mountain claims the lives of the unprepared -- and even seasoned hikers -- again and again.
Just two days earlier, the body of a woman who went missing after hiking on Mt. Baldy was found. Recovery efforts, which spanned a week, were limited by heavy snow and other extreme weather as an atmospheric river slammed the state.
Sadly, these incidents are not infrequent on Mt. Baldy. CNN reports from the area: "A woman spent four nights trapped in her car [in January] after toppling to the bottom of a California canyon. British actor Julian Sands was discovered dead on the mountain in June 2023 after he went missing on a hike earlier in the year."
Proximity to the City of Angels, high winds, exposed, slippery terrain, and unexpectedly low temperatures -- as much as 33 degrees below the valley -- are reasons for the continued rescues and casualties on Mt. Baldy, according to OutsideOnline.com.
We've talked before on this blog about how the Pacific Ocean feeds redwood trees with fog. Today, we're highlighting a different effect that the weather has on trees.
The Mount Rainier National Park Service posted this photo to Instagram on Jan. 24, 2024, showing subalpine fir trees at the edge of a meadow in the park. These trees have to survive dozens of feet of snow and harsh winter winds. As a result, they won't grow branches on their windward sides -- and grow crookedly to support the weight of the snow.
"Trees that become twisted or stunted under the extreme conditions at high elevations are called 'krummholtz,'" the Park Service explained. "The word comes from German for 'crooked wood.'” They may have altered forms compared to lower elevation trees, but krummholz admirably still survive in harsh mountain conditions."
Krummholtz also happens in coastal areas where the wind blows nonstop, causing trees to grow leaves and branches only on the leeward side.
Mount Rainier became the fifth national park in the United States in 1899. In 2006, 18 inches of rain fell on the mountain, overwhelming streams and causing massive damage.
Ice formations come in many different shapes, including pancake ice, rime ice, ice rings, ice disks, turquoise ice, sea-spray ice, ice spikes, ice donuts, ice pushes, and ice bells.
But on Jan. 20, 2024, Tim M. Nelson photographed a bizarre ice formation -- that doesn't fit any of those definitions -- on a creek at Lake Conway, Arkansas. His pictures show circular ice disks surrounding trees, with icicles dripping off the edges.
There isn't a name for these formations yet, so we'll call them "ice chandeliers." The way the phenomenon forms isn't too hard to guess; ice attached to a tree stays stuck to it as the stream slowly melts the other ice away, smoothing the edges. When the water level drops, and those discs start to melt, you get the "chandelier" effect.
After making history by capturing a rare panorama of the auroral phenomenon known as "STEVE" last autumn, Storm Chaser Aaron Rigsby struck gold again when he combined astronomical and meteorological events together into one unique photo after midnight in the corn fields of Iowa.
"During extreme cold," Rigsby told AccuWeather, "Moisture in the atmosphere freezes, and any city lights that aren't beamed downward reflect off of these suspended ice crystals and cause giant towers of light, called 'light pillars.' I had this idea to capture the movement of the stars with these beautiful towers of light. But I wasn't sure if it was going to work."
"When you're looking towards the North star," Rigsby explained, "All of the stars' positions are moving around it [with Earth's rotation] and when you stack them all together you can see the circular movement. These are referred to as 'star trails.'"
Rigsby wasn't even chasing a storm when he discovered this opportunity; he was returning westward to Colorado after covering a Midwest snowstorm. After posting the photo to Twitter and Instagram, Rigsby's followers were astonished at the combination. To give an idea what the wintry scene looked like to the naked eye, the second photo in this gallery shows a snapshot of the ice pillars without star trails.
The town of Grinnell, Iowa has a tragic past. In June 1882, a violent F5 tornado destroyed the Grinnell College campus, and seven years later in the same month, a fire destroyed most of downtown.
G. Roxanne Bybee watched snow accumulate near Littleton, Colorado Sunday night, Jan. 7, 2024. After a cool and cloudy Monday, the sun came out on Tuesday and the snow started slowly sliding off her car, making for an odd but viral photo.
"The sun was out, and in the afternoon, the snow on the hood started to slide slowly. My husband noticed that there was one fold of snow hung up on the license plate, but about an hour and a half later, it became the now famous 'snow blanket,'" Bybee said.
She took photos and uploaded them to Discover Colorado | Through Your Photos, a Facebook group, where they were shared more than 1,000 times. The gallery above also includes additional angles and photos from later in the week, proving the snow maintained its shape as it melted off.
As Bybee guessed, the temperature, sun angle, water content and slope of the hood all contributed to this bizarre scene. How snow crystals latch together also helps govern snow folding, which has also been observed on other cars, walls, and even a playground slide.
Extreme Meteorologist Reed Timmer stayed overnight at the summit of the Mount Washington Observatory in New Hampshire on Jan. 4, 2024, and experienced 95-mph winds, up close and personal. Timmer was on top of the mountain with the Storm Front Freaks podcast team, celebrating their 200th episode.
At 6,288 feet in elevation, Mount Washington, the highest peak in the Northeast U.S., is often said to be home to "the world's worst weather" and frequently measures extreme winds. In fact, it holds the Northern and Western Hemisphere's wind record of 231 mph, recorded in 1934.
On the morning of Jan. 5, Reed and the Storm Front Freaks team were treated to a more serene sunrise (with "only" 65-mph winds and a wind chill of 40 degrees below zero). The horizon was painted orange and yellow, and the observatory and antennas were covered in rime ice, which forms when freezing fog builds up on objects.
New Hampshire’s Mount Washington is said to have some of the worst weather in the world. On Jan. 4, extreme meteorologist Reed Timmer was at the summit of the mountain as winds raged over top of it.
The 25th Annual Harbin Ice and Snow World, also known as Bingxue Large World, opened Dec. 18, 2023, in Harbin, Heilongjiang Province, China. Although its origins can be traced back to the 1960s, the festival was reinvented for the new millennium and now attracts millions of tourists yearly.
Harbin is located in northeast China and frequently experiences snow and temperatures below 0 degrees Fahrenheit. Ice is borrowed from the nearby Songhua River, sawed, and chiseled into 2,000 large, intricate ice structures laid out over 8.7 million square feet of land. In 2018, the festival set a world record with a building carved from ice that measured more than 100 feet high.
Mount Etna, on the island of Sicily, Italy, erupted early on the morning of Nov. 25, 2023. Etna is one of the world's most active volcanoes, with eruptions nearly every year, documented back to 2,700 years ago.
At over 11,000 feet tall, the mountain is typically snow-covered, making for striking juxtapositions of orange lava and white snow, as captured in this photo. Etna has also been documented to emit perfectly round smoke rings.
On June 28, 2023, storm chaser Justin Snead did what few chasers have. He took a high-resolution photo of lightning within the circulation of a tornado in Kimball, Nebraska. Most people who see tornadoes shoot video with their phones; many chasers use a high-resolution video camera. Few people pause during the adrenaline action of a swirling tornado to shoot still photos with a digital camera and tripod.
Snead explained in his Instagram post, “To my knowledge, myself and chasing homie David Baxter are the only two to have captured this event as a hi-res shot. Despite the chaos going on, we knew with the lightning barrage surrounding us we had to risk it for the shot. The funny thing is that we didn’t coordinate our shooting styles at all. I pretty much grabbed my tripod and took off running down the road toward the tornado for a nice field shot.”
Lightning concurrent with tornadoes is less common than you might believe. In 2007, one study of a thunderstorm in Arizona showed that cloud-to-ground lightning (as captured in Snead’s photo) fell to near zero while “in cloud” lightning -- strikes that don’t reach the ground -- rose quickly where large hail and high winds ensued. This is likely why more storm chasers aren’t struck by lightning while filming high winds, large hail and tornadoes in supercell thunderstorms.
The solar cycle is an approximately 11-year pattern marked by increases and decreases in sun activity and sunspots. After a minimum was reached in 2019, a peak is expected in 2024, so we’re now entering a high-activity period. With increased solar activity comes increased chances to spot the aurora borealis.
Julianna Glinskas, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service office in Glasgow, Montana, captured a spectacular photo of the northern lights on Nov. 5, 2023. The colorful display that night was visible as far south as Texas and North Carolina, according to SpaceWeather.com photographers.
The same night, an NWS photographer at the Riverton, Wyoming, office snapped a rather artistic picture of the aurora, with the office’s WSR-88D NEXRAD radar standing tall in the foreground. Click on the gallery above to see that photo.
Photography by Tandem Wheels is a husband-and-wife photography team that takes pictures of the weather and nature in the Pacific Northwest. Sean Wheeler had a memorable morning last winter, when he took his camera out to a field in the Skagit Valley region of Washington state in search of nature pictures. Temperatures were in the low 20s F after a snowfall when a flock of snow geese landed in a field at sunrise.
"An early morning I don’t think I could ever forget," Wheeler said on X, formerly known as Twitter, when he posted the photo. He explained that with each honk and exhale, the geese’s breath was visible, and it appeared to glow gold in the nature picture. “It was amazing to be there.”
Snow geese population in North America has risen from 1 million in 1970 to at least 13 million today, and flocks can contain as many as 11,000 of the birds, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. This time of year, they can be seen in the Midwest and Northeast, eating leftover corn and wheat on their migration south. (edited)
Laurie DeMent, a photographer from New Castle, Colorado, was thrilled to capture these colorful photographs of fall foliage and morning fog at a lake in her neighborhood park on Oct. 13, 2023. Residents in the area believe that this autumn's color has been particularly spectacular, with one Facebook user commenting on DeMent's photo, "This morning's drive to Glenwood was probably the most beautiful I've ever seen, and I've lived in New Castle since 1977."
DeMent told AccuWeather, "The pond has been a favorite place of mine for fall photos in years past so I was waiting for the right morning to take some photos this year. That Friday, I saw the fog hanging low on the mountains around town and I grabbed my camera."
"The perfectly still water, the early morning fog, and the bright pops of fall colors all came together perfectly!" DeMent said, adding, "I got down as close to the surface of the water as I could, and had time to line up several satisfying shots before the sun came in and the fog rolled out for the day."
Something very special took place on Oct. 14, 2023, in southern Utah. A solar eclipse graced the scenic Bryce Canyon during its 100th anniversary, just like it did the year the park was born. The National Park Service captured multiple photos, which they composited into this image, showing the progress of the eclipse as it traversed the sky over the colorful canyon.
"In 1923, Bryce Canyon experienced a partial eclipse during a total solar eclipse that passed along the Pacific coast. For our centennial year we’ve now come 'full circle' with today’s 'Ring of Fire' eclipse," the NPS said on the Bryce Canyon NP Facebook page,
The 36,000-acre park, which boasts some of the world's best air quality, won't experience another total eclipse for hundreds of years, the NPS said.
The path of the Oct. 14, 2023 eclipse, with the star designating the location of Bryce Canyon National Park.
Santiago Borja captures amazing aerial storm and cloud photos from his seat as a long-haul commercial airline pilot. "At first, I was only a pilot, but then I got lucky to fly international routes... so we spent a lot of time in the airplane and usually with extra crew," Borja told AccuWeather about his unique situation. "I started doing photography, then focused on storms because I've always loved weather." Borja added, "Of course, your number one priority in the air is safety. But then you want to capture some of these amazing images."
In this now-viral photo, a strong thunderstorm (Cumulonimbus cloud) over the Pacific Ocean south of Panama City flashes lightning as Borja's Boeing 767 circles the airport at 37,000 feet. He said of the photo, "The storm had developed over a strong temperature inversion that created the low layer of clouds. Its updrafts were so fast that they actually pierced the tropopause and created the so-called overshooting tops." The photo won Borja the 3rd place landscape winner in the National Geographic 2016 Nature Photographer of the Year.
In the second photo shown in the gallery above, a lightning strike thunders down from a thunderstorm over Ecuador. The lightning has a second "ghost image" strike displaced ever so slightly away from the original. This is because, although they seem to happen at once to the human eye, lightning strikes often contain multiple strokes, and if you're traveling too fast while taking the photo, the strokes will repeat slightly apart from each other on the final image.
It’s not often that a pilot is also a photographer, providing some truly unique views of storms and our world.
There's nothing more beautiful than fall colors with the first snowfall, especially in the Rocky Mountains. Rocko Menzyk, a photographer for Alta Ski Area captured just that in a series of photos on Oct. 2, 2023, marking the beginning of the inevitable plunge of temperatures into winter. This was the first snow of the season to fall from top to bottom at Alta, located just outside of Salt Lake City, Utah, this season.
Alta Ski Resort was one of the first to open in the United States in 1938. Last winter, the ski slope recorded 903 inches (75.25 feet) of snow, a new record and one of the highest amounts ever measured in the United States.
Who -- or what -- is STEVE? We asked storm chaser Aaron Rigsby, who often chases severe weather for AccuWeather. He recently took amazing photos, including a panorama, of the rare phenomenon on Sept. 18, 2023, during a showing of the Aurora Borealis.
“STEVE stands for Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement," Rigsgy explained. "It occurs with the northern lights but is not an aurora. Technically, it’s a ‘skyglow’ created by heated, shining particles in the ionosphere. I’ve seen Aurora dozens of times and have never actually captured STEVE until now.”
The unique light streak has appeared three times in the lower 48 United States so far this year, Rigsby said. It was first documented in 2016.
“After the first initial bursts of the auroral substorm, I first noticed STEVE, thinking it was part of the aurora,” he said. “It wasn’t until I saw the ‘picket fence’ of green aurora that I realized it was a STEVE, and I scrambled to point my camera in that direction.”
Not only is STEVE elusive, but nighttime panoramas are also very difficult because the stars and aurora move so fast.
“When I got home and loaded the photos onto my computer, I anxiously watched as my program stitched them together,” added Rigsby. “When it was done, I sat there smiling because it actually worked, and I was able to capture this beautiful scene successfully.”
The beautiful photo shown above was taken by Jonathan Benz and posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, on Sept. 22, 2023.
Or was it?
It's hard to know what's real on the Internet these days, so the kneejerk reaction to a photo that looks "too good to be true" is to try to point out what seems to be disinformation. When people started posting pictures of similar peak fall foliage near Grand Marais and Lutsen, Minnesota, last week, the Internet wasn't having it. "I am going to call this a lie... no way this was taken this morning. I doubt it's even a picture of northern MN," said one person on X. "I'm thinking this is an old photo," said another X user.
The photographer replied to the post to defend the photo, sharing what is considered "proof" in the photography community -- a screen capture of the “EXIF” data embedded in the original file from the camera, showing the date and time that the picture was taken.
A map showing current fall color on Sept. 12, 2023, with Minnesota's North Shore encircled. (ExploreFall.com)
ExploreFall, a new website that runs a high-resolution weather model to estimate where differing levels of autumn color appear, stepped into the fray, saying, "Lots of unbelievers in these comments! The North Shore's maple forests often peak in mid-September, so this is right on schedule." A local website confirmed that peak color was achieved on Sept. 22.
Indeed, an unusual combination of latitude and geography creates a peak of fall foliage colors in the North Shore region of northern Minnesota far before the peak occurs in New England and even ahead of the Rockies. According to ExploreFall's map, peak color was already present in that area on Sept. 12. Satellite photos from previous years show the brilliant autumn colors in the region before any others in the nation, like this one from Sept. 17, 2020.
So, yes, Jonathan's photo is real -- and he has a video to corroborate it.
A satellite photo shows fall color at Minnesota's North Shore on Sept. 12, 2020. (NASA/NOAA)
“Moose Mountain in Lutsen doesn’t disappoint,” X user @BBenzjonathan wrote when posting the video to social media.
A double rainbow stretched from one end of Manhattan to the other on September 11, 2023, with some photos showing the colors arching over One World Trade Center in New York City on the 22nd anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.
Video taken by Meghan Wallace shows an bird’s-eye view of the double rainbow arching over the Manhattan skyline -- and into the buildings below. Rainbows can be circular, when viewed from extremely high places such as mountains, drones, helicopters, and skyscrapers. Sharing the video on TikTok, Wallace wrote: “The most insane thing I’ve ever seen in real life.”
Typhoon Saola, known as Goring in the Philippines, was packing sustained winds of 130 mph offshore from Hong Kong as of 8 p.m. HKT on Sept. 1, down from 155 mph on Aug. 31, both qualifying it as a "Violent Typhoon" and the equivalent of a Category 4 on the Saffir-Simpson Wind Scale. Saola will continue to slowly drag along the coast of China this week with high winds and flooding rainfall, only making it to the island of Hainan by late Monday, the equivalent of a major hurricane taking three days to move up the coast of Florida. The Hong Kong Observatory issued a No. 10 hurricane signal, the highest warning under the city’s weather system and the first such warning from the observatory since 2018.
Pierre Markuse downloaded this photo of the extremely detailed eye of Typhoon Saola from the Copernicus Sentinel 2 satellite on Aug. 31, 2023. The image shows that a hurricane's eye is not always completely clear, even in the strongest storms. In fact, the eye of a stronger storm can be filled with a handful of "mesovortices" -- small-scale rotational features first extensively studied inside Hurricane Isabel's eye in 2003, and noted in satellite photos as early as 1994 in Hurricane Emilia. Two photos of the mesovortices shot from a reconnaissance plane on Sept. 1, are also shown in the photo gallery below.
Mesovortices are not the only exciting part of this satellite photo. Although Sentinel 2 does take high-resolution photos, artificial intelligence was used to improve the resolution of this photo. Markuse explained on Twitter, "I used a combination of Photoshop's new AI Super Resolution and Topaz Gigapixel AI, which both were definitely not trained for satellite images but can - at least sometimes - help to upscale images to better prepare them for printing or viewing on really big displays."
The Indianola, Oklahoma fire department responded to a call about a tree struck by lightning on the evening of Aug. 13, 2023. What they saw when they got there was a ghostly "hell tree" that was completely made of embers.
Most of the time, when a tree is struck by lightning, the bark is split from top to bottom, but the lightning exits safely through the ground. Sometimes, the lightning can set the inside of the tree on fire. Perhaps that is how this fire started; by this stage, it had consumed most of the tree.
Either way, trees, especially lone trees might keep you dry for a few minutes but they are not good lightning shelters. If a tree is struck and you're under it, you can be killed.
This photo may initially look like a "sideways rainbow," but what you're really seeing is the left side of a full-circle rainbow. You can also see a double rainbow faintly at left. Seeing a rainbow in 360 degrees isn't easy because you have to be above the horizon, with the sun -- and rain -- beneath you.
This can be achieved from the edge of a mountain, in a plane or helicopter, or, as photographer Michael Probst did, while viewing a rainbow from his drone on the outskirts of Frankfurt, Germany, on Aug. 6, 2023. A second, zoomed-in version of the rainbow is available in the gallery above.
After issuing a severe thunderstorm warning for the city, a forecaster at the National Weather Service office in Cheyenne, Wyoming, took a panoramic photo as the storm's shelf cloud overtook the building. In the background, the NEXRAD radar for Cheyenne stood sentinel, scanning the storm for information to assist meteorologists.
According to the NWS-Cheyenne website, the first Cheyenne Weather Office was established by the U.S. Signal Service in 1870. In 1883, the Weather Bureau of the United States began to utilize the office in Cheyenne. This new national government entity was established and approved by President Ulysses S. Grant to provide meteorological observations to military stations.
Fields of sunflowers are blossoming on farms and countrysides across Europe and North America, a sign that summer is halfway over. Photographers in Germany recently captured breathtaking images of fields of the tall, iconic flowers with colorful sunrises and dark storm clouds in the background. One photographer even managed to snap some photos of bumblebees hard at work collecting and spreading pollen from flower to flower.
“Sunflowers don’t require a lot of rain,” Mike Von Bergen told AccuWeather National Reporter Emmy Victor. Von Bergen owns a farm in northern Illinois where he grows 14 fields of sunflowers. This year, the towering flowers bloomed about a week behind schedule, and Von Bergen speculated that the delay could have been related to spells of Canadian wildfire smoke that impacted the region.
Sunflowers will remain in bloom throughout the remainder of summer and into the first half of autumn before the arrival of colder weather.
It’s one of the best times of year for flower lovers, as sunflower fields bloom across the country. AccuWeather’s Emmy Victor explains how farmers are feeling relieved after navigating weather challenges.
A summer monsoon sunset, with a faint rainbow visible on the right, as seen from Grand Canyon Village at Grand Canyon National Park (NPS)
The annual North American monsoon is underway, a time of year when thunderstorms become more prevalent across the Four Corners and Rocky Mountains. The monsoon season runs from June 15 through Sept. 30, and while the season has been off to a slow start this year, meteorologists and photographers alike are starting to see an uptick in thunderstorms.
Earlier this month, the National Park Service shared an image of a monsoonal thunderstorm seen from Grand Canyon Village, a popular tourist destination on the southern rim of the Gand Canyon. The national park is considered one of the seven natural wonders of the world, and a colorful sunset amid a monsoonal thunderstorm enhanced the jaw-dropping view of the world-famous park. Clouds associated with the thunderstorm glowed in shades of pink and purple, while a veil of rain appeared yellow. A rainbow could also be seen to the right of the storm above the canyon’s rim.
As beautiful as it may be, the weather at the Grand Canyon can be dangerous. Temperatures in the canyon frequently exceed 100 degrees in June, July and August, which raises the risk of dehydration, heat exhaustion and heat stroke for folks who spend extended time hiking. Additionally, summertime thunderstorms can develop quickly and trigger lightning strikes and flash flooding that could impact areas miles away from the storm.
Layers of clouds cover North Africa. They have a swirl like appearance and are grouped over the surface. â?£(NASA)
When astronauts travel to the International Space Station, they spend months living on the celestial outpost that orbits the Earth once every 90 minutes. While scientific experiments are one of the top priorities, some astronauts like to take pictures of the Earth during their spare time. The photos they take are out of this world -- literally. Flying 250 miles above the Earth’s surface, they have a perspective of the weather that only a handful of humans have ever seen for themselves.
NASA recently shared one photo taken by an astronaut when the space station was over North Africa. The sun was low on the horizon, causing towering clouds to cast shadows that stretched over 100 miles. A thin layer of translucent clouds could also be seen glowing in shades of pink and gold.
Prolific amounts of rainfall triggered raging floodwaters that turned deadly in portions of India over the weekend as the country navigates its wettest time of the year: the monsoon season. More than two dozen people died due to flooding or mudslides on Sunday, July 9, Reuters reported.
The city of Chandigarh, located in Punjab, received more than 30 inches of rain over the course of 48 hours. In this photo, a man looks at a swollen Beas River following heavy rains in Kullu, Himachal Pradesh, India. The Beas River runs from an elevation of over 14,000 feet down to sea-level.
As the full moon rose over San Francisco Bay on July 2, 2023, fog poured in around Mount Tamalpais, and Mill Valley, California, making for amazing photos. The California Parks Service confirms this fact, writing that the mountain is famous for its panoramic views of The Bay Area.
The fog that comes and goes on the Pacific Coast around San Francisco is so famous that it has its own Twitter accounts, "Karla" and "Karl the Fog." California fog even has its own season and routinely delays schools.
Houston Zoo animals are staying cool during the heat of the summer, according to a Houston Zoo blog on June 30, 2023 -- and that's a good thing! Afternoon temperatures in Houston haven't dropped below 96 degrees in the last two weeks, and have been as high as 100 degrees F, according to AccuWeather.
The blog explains: "The Zoo’s dedicated animal care teams are adding frozen summertime treats to the animal menu. In the Galápagos tortoise habitat, tortoises, shown in the second photo, enjoy a cool water spray that helps them keep comfortable."
"Other animals, like Claud the black bear, shown here," the blog continues, "keep cool by taking a splash in their refreshing pool. Black bears are curious creatures by nature and giving them a pool is for more than just play. Their animal care team offers food items in the water to help them beat the summer heat. In South America’s Pantanal, the Capybara family, shown in the third photo, also enjoys taking a swim. Capybaras are excellent swimmers and a semi-aquatic species."
Animals at the Houston Zoo in Houston, Texas, enjoyed some fun with water as the south-central United States heated up in late June, with temperatures rising over 100 degrees.
“I was at a wedding last weekend in Lake Tahoe and everyone was very intrigued by these unique cloud formations… they made us all hungry for some pancakes,” AccuWeather’s Mallory Lemieux said.
In fact, these lenticular clouds, most recently featured on this blog as Los Angeles residents were taken aback by these 'UFO clouds,' are called "stacked" when they appear as several repeating horizontal cloud decks, bringing definition to the atmosphere flow at different levels.
Click through to the gallery above to see a weather satellite photo of what these clouds looked like from above on June 18, 2023.
As Cyclone Biparjoy slowly approached India's west coast this week, local authorities prepared for the storm, which caused long periods of huge, crashing waves. Despite being far enough south to miss the storm's wind and rain, Mumbai was among the many cities and villages preparing for the storm's waves.
Over 100,000 people were evacuated from the coasts of India and Pakistan before the storm. Biparjoy was a Category 2 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale at landfall and is the second-strongest cyclone on record to hit that region. High winds from the storm caused infrastructure damage, and heavy rains caused flooding in the coastal town of Mandvi.
See more photos in our Cyclone Biparjoy photo gallery.
Meteorologists at AccuWeather headquarters in State College, Pennsylvania, took to Twitter to post photos of what is colloquially called a "fire rainbow" on May 16, 2023.
The optical phenomenon is known to scientists as a circumhorizon arc and is created by sunlight reflecting off of ice crystals. To see this ice halo, the sun must be more than 58 degrees high in the sky, and high cirrus clouds or jet contrails must be present to bring this spectacular display to life.
A particularly vivid display of circumhorizon arcs was seen widely in North Carolina on April 15, Good Friday, 2022.
After a harsh, snowy winter, one of the most difficult roads to plow for the National Park Service is the "Going-to-the-sun Road," which leads to Logan Pass, Montana, not far from the Canadian border.
Snow removal crews start plowing the road in April, but the road doesn’t open until the summer. The final section to plow is called "The Big Drift" where the snow can be 80 feet deep. On May 25, 2023, Glacier National Park shared photos of what employees are dealing with on Twitter.
Although a warm spring is helping, there is no estimated opening date yet; the record latest was July 13, in 2022, 2020, and 2011. You can find out more information about Logan Pass on the National Park Service's podcast "Headwaters."
Chris Fukuda took a stunningly vivid photo of the sun rising over the Capitol building on May 11, 2023. Nearly a week later, the sunrise over the Capitol was still particularly colorful, as illustrated by another picture snapped by "Jeannie in D.C." on Twitter.
Before most people woke up on May 17, one man was outside in Bellevue, Washington with his cameras and telescopes. Steve Rice expected to film Jupiter passing behind the moon in an astronomical event called an occultation but thought he might miss it due to the thick smoke. At the last minute, he was able to capture the event, however faintly.
On the same morning, the National Weather Service in Seattle posted photos of a "surreal" red sun rising from a smoky landscape-- something you might liken to a "Mars sunset" -- except sunsets are actually blue on the Red Planet.
The sunset also lit up billowing smoke from the wildfires raging across Alberta on May 9. As of May 17, there were 27 fires labeled as "out of control"of a total more than 91 infernos, according to Reuters. More than 30,000 people were evacuated in the region.
Check out all of the photos, and a satellite image showing the smoke, in the gallery above.
Dave LaFaive stepped out on his porch in Plymouth, Indiana, on May 7, 2023, and saw something incredible. Pouches of rain clouds hung from the sky, distended and stretched from one side of the horizon to the other. What he saw is something we've featured several times in this photo blog: mammatus clouds.
While they may look rather threatening, mammatus clouds aren’t necessarily indicators that severe weather is about to unfold. Unlike most clouds created by rising air, the bulbous mammatus clouds typically develop after a thunderstorm has cleared and air sinks.
Plymouth, located south of South Bend, Indiana, was home to the first retail outlet of the Montgomery Ward company in 1926.
Key West, Florida, residents were treated to a rare and complex display of ice halos and other atmospheric phenomena on of May 2, 2023. The local National Weather Service office posted on Twitter: "Who else has been admiring the incredible halo/arc/sun dog display this evening?"
In addition to a 22-degree halo adorned with sundogs (parhelia), a more rare 46-degree halo was also present, as was an upper tangent arc, a Parry arc, and a circumzenithal arc. Such complex displays are most commonly seen in winter at high latitudes, but can be spotted anywhere on Earth at any time of year. Conditions only require widespread cirrostratus clouds made of ice crystals to be present high in the sky.
A similar but more impressive display of ice halos in Germany was previously illustrated in this blog on Dec. 22, 2022.
This photo of a sunset, captured on March 19, 2023, looks like something from a sci-fi movie. The sun is setting behind Wat Saket Ratcha Wora Maha Wihan, a Buddhist temple in Bangkok, Thailand (Wat Saket, for short). The temple is on "Golden Mount," the only hill in the city.
Bangkok has a wet and hot climate, with low temperatures ranging from 72 to 80 degrees Fahrenheit (22-27 Celsius) on average, and high temperatures between 88 and 95 F (31-35 C). April is the hottest month, while September is the wettest. Thailand is affected by heavy rain from tropical cyclones that typically move over the country as weaker storms from the east. In 2011, severe flooding from Tropical Storm Nock-ten affected several historical sites.
The National Park Service announced earlier this month that they are delaying the Grand Canyon National Park's "North Rim" seasonal opening, after 250 inches of snow this winter, twice what the location typically receives. The extra time is needed to plow the road leading to the North Rim, repair and rebuild trails, and reopen visitor facilities.
At 8,000 feet elevation, the North Rim is described as "the other side" of the Grand Canyon and is only visited by 10 percent of park visitors.
This isn't the first time that the park has been featured in this photo blog. A photo of snow at the Grand Canyon was the first post in this blog on April 16, 2021, and a lightning pic was also featured on Nov. 4, 2021.
Mammoth Mountain Ski Resort in California is living up to its name. At the mountain’s summit, which is located at an elevation of 11,053 feet, a record season total of 882 inches (74 feet) of snow has been measured this winter.
At the base of that mountain sits Mammoth Lakes, where the snow has buried dozens of million-dollar homes and condominiums two to three stories high. This winter, it has taken an army of volunteers not only to dig out the driveways but also to remove the snow from roofs to avoid collapse.
The ski slopes at Mammoth have had to close some days this winter when roads closed or snow buried ski lifts, but they are open again and plan to stay open longer than they ever have, likely through July.
In this photo taken March 22, 2023, a visitor takes a picture on their smartphone of a brilliant sunset with beautiful cherry blossoms along the Tidal Basin in Washington D.C. The peak bloom date for the blossoms occurred the next day.
Since online records began in 2004, it was the third-earliest peak bloom, according to National Park Service website, which also says that overall peak bloom dates have ranged between March 15 (1990) and April 18 (1958). A gift to the United States from the major of Tokyo, Japan in 1912, 1,800 Yoshino Cherry (Prunus x yedoensis) trees have blossomed in D.C. since that year.
Location, location, location, or so the saying goes. Standing out amongst a sea of snow photos this winter, the location that made this snow photo special was a drone camera, several hundred feet over a park maze in Gelsenkirchen, Germany, on a wintry March 8, 2023.
Mazes are a worldwide phenomenon, but according to Smithsonian Magazine, they served a specific purpose in Germany. Young men would traverse labyrinths as a rite of passage to becoming an adult.
Gelsenkirchen is known as the "blue city" due to the color's prominence local architecture and artwork. The city has weather similar to Vancouver, Canada.
Yosemite National Park, like many other mountain locations in California, has seen a lot of snow this season. Nearby Mammoth Mountain Ski Area reported a total of 569 inches as of March 10, 2023. That's over 46 feet! There have been a lot of impressive photos circulating in the media showing snow-buried buildings, and we've added one of those from the park to the slideshow above.
But the snowy landscape can also be breathtakingly artistic and even serene, as demonstrated by this picture taken by a National Park Service road crew reopening the highway after the latest round of snowfall ending March 1, 2023. The park's mountains are shrouded in snow but blue skies prevail. Icicles hang from the tunnel's entrance, and a cleared road gives a hint that springlike weather will eventually return.
Rising up more than 2,400 feet above Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the "Christ the Redeemer" reinforced-concrete statue was built to withstand 124-mph winds and has weathered many a storm. Lightning rods on the head and arms direct frequent strikes to the ground, but lightning still caused significant damage in 2008 and 2014.
On Feb. 10, 2023, photographer Fernando Braga was at the right place at the right time and captured amazing pictures of a lightning strike hitting the top of the statue. Braga said on Instagram that he had "lots and lots of frustrating attempts" to catch this shot before finally being successful. He titled the photo "Divine Lightning."
Major restoration of the statue was performed in 2021, the 90th anniversary of its completion. Unveiled in 1931, the cultural icon was awarded "New Seven Wonders of the World" status in 2000. A photo from the top of the statue was featured previously in this blog.
Dave DiCello, a professional photographer in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, snapped this photo of an enchanting sunrise on Feb. 2, also known as Groundhog Day 2023. He has taken thousands of photos of the Steel City in various kinds of weather, including lightning, fog, rainbows, and the four seasons.
DiCello said on Twitter: "Happy Groundhog Day everyone. Is that a thing? Do people say that? Either way, Phil saw his shadow which means six more weeks of winter, but if sunrises like today's in Pittsburgh come with that, I'm fine with it. Just enough color to make for a beautiful start to the day."
Pittsburgh's climate is fairly temperate, but it can occasionally get below 0 degrees Fahrenheit, or above 100 F. Record temperatures range from 22 degrees below zero in 1994 to a record high of 103 F, set most recently in 1988.
Photographer Ash O'Malley from Toronto, Ontario, Canada tried many times to get this shot of foggy trees in the snow, but it required several important ingredients that she had to wait for. "One of my favourite images," she said on Twitter on Jan. 3, 2022. "It took numerous visits to get the fresh snow, sunlight and shadows all at once. Persistence pays off."
The icing on the cake is the fog, which makes the image look otherworldly, especially with the larger tree standing out against the background.
Toronto, the largest city in Canada, receives about 43 inches of snow each season, similar to southern New England or the Poconos of Pennsylvania.
Ski resorts were grateful for hundreds of inches of snow provided by a series of atmospheric rivers that affected the West Coast of the U.S. and Canada in late December 2022. But the moisture-laden air also caused problems. Big White Ski Resort in British Columbia, Canada, took to Facebook on Dec. 28 to explain why their "Powder Chair" ski lift was closed the day before. The accompanying photo showed the ski lift encased in at least half a foot of what meteorologists call "rime ice."
Rime ice forms when tiny, near-freezing water droplets, usually from thick fog and other clouds, attach to the surface of a below-freezing object and turn into ice immediately on contact. It is most common on exposed mountain tops. It may look similar to hoarfrost, but is much more solid, heavy, and difficult to remove.
"Anyone that’s been in the resort knows that the weather over the past few days has been unpredictable and unseasonable," its Facebook page wrote. "Each morning, our lift mechanics and operators start at approximately 6:30 a.m. to inspect and go through start-up procedures. We take into account wind direction, speed, humidity, and temperature. This is a manual procedure and one that takes an extraordinary amount of experience and safety protocols."
Dec. 27 was one of Big White's busiest days of the season, and it came at the end of one of the atmospheric rivers. "Over the past few days," the post explained to their customers, "we’ve had a tremendous problem with rime ice (blue ice) encasing our chairlifts, haul cables, and running wheels, which are all designed to be deiced before the lift can start. In the last 24 hours, we had a major lift closure on the Powder Chair due to ice falling on two safety pins simultaneously."
That resulted in the ski lift being evacuated, which took nearly an hour, and guests who had arrived to ride the lift had to be turned back. However, some commenters on the Facebook post thanked them for the detailed diatribe to explain what went wrong.
In August 2022, Mitch Crispe and his husband decided to stop at one of their favorite trails in Del Norte Coast Redwood State Park, California, on their way to a birthday party.
"When conditions are right," Crispe explained, "You can get these gorgeous rays of sun that shine down through a layer of fog that is slowly burning off. We hadn't had these conditions during previous visits, but this time things lined up perfectly!"
Crispe, a fitness trainer and photographer from Canada but living in California, took hundreds of photos and videos that day but admits this one really stood out.
According to a popular hiking website, the largest Redwood trees on this trail are found at the top of the ridge. Unlike Redwoods found in lower elevations, the trees here help catch fog that streams off the Pacific Ocean, giving them the ability to grow into giants.