Global Climate Maps

"Climatemaps visualizes the weather over the course of a year around the whole world. The map animates average global monthly climate data from 1961-1990 to show you when every location in the world has its hottest, driest or wettest weather." - http://googlemapsmania.blogspot.nl/2016/08/annual-weather-patterns.html#links

Rare weather event causes stunning ‘fire rainbow cloud’ to appear

Pretty spectacular example of cloud iridescence.

Article and video

Nice ones I found on Flickr: (FFS you need a Yahoo account to download pics there nowadays)

More than a sundog

Article

Airplane flight timelapse from San Fransisco to Paris

Epic timelapse! There's more info on the YouTube page.

Epic News day

I've been glued to various live streams covering the riots in Egypt all day. The whole day the front lines between the anti-Mubarak protesters and the pro-Mubarak supporters have moved up and down the main street. The thugs supporting Mubarak seem to have started the violence, at one point charging into the crowds with horses and camels, later they started throwing molotov cokctails, they also drove a bus into the crowds. At night the anti-Mubarak protesters fought back hard moving up, shielded with steel barriers, in a phalanx formation.
But much more was going on today. The NASA Kepler time announced the biggest find of exoplanets yet:

"We went from zero to 68 Earth-sized planet candidates and zero to 54 candidates in the habitable zone - a region where liquid water could exist on a planet’s surface. Some candidates could even have moons with liquid water," said William Borucki of NASA’s Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., and the Kepler Mission’s science principal investigator. "Five of the planetary candidates are both near Earth-size and orbit in the habitable zone of their parent stars."
Planet candidates require follow-up observations to verify they are actual planets. "We have found over twelve hundred candidate planets - that’s more than all the people have found so far in history," said Borucki. "Now, these are candidates, but most of them, I’m convinced, will be confirmed as planets in the coming months and years."
Among the stars with planetary candidates, 170 show evidence of multiple planetary candidates, including one, Kepler-11, that scientists have been able to confirm that has no fewer than six planets.

Also a colossal winter storm in America covering two thirds of the country. It consists of snowstorms, blizzards, ice storms, and thundersnow.
More extreme weather as Cyclone Yasi becomes one of the biggest cyclones to ever hit Australia.

Finally the volcano Shinmoedake has been erupting in Japan, resulting in a massive explosion and pretty night lightning.

More pictures of the volcano and lightning.
Hard to keep up with, but a good excuse not to be working on my thesis.

Lighthouse becomes Icehouse

I wonder how long the lighthouse can support all that weight if more ice keeps accumulating.

Related blog posts: Ice Storm, Lighthouse vs Waves

World Cloud Time-lapse (30 days)

I tried to find a world cloud time-lapse. Could not find a one of the whole world and longer than a day (anyone?). The BBC weather site shows the current world cloud map. I hacked the BBC ;) and found hourly infrared images of the last 30 days. Made you a time-lapse. Sorry dekus, another cloud time-lapse.

Now I want high resolution images and a full year.

Giving the Firefox Status Bar more PNWAGE

There are a lot of fun things you can add to that boring status bar at the bottom of your browser. After reading a compilation of the top 50 Firefox Status Bar addons for your toobar. I found a few good ones and installed them. These include For all our geeky stat needs there's Extended Statusbar One I use a lot is Forecastfox. It has a nice looking 3 day forecast with extra info on mouseover. It also has buttons to a 5-day and an hourly forecast. Finally there's a button that shows the cloudradar over Europe. Now if I could only integrate buienradar into this, it would be perfect. Then for the geek's e-penis there's the TabCounter it counts how many tabs are open and also keeps a record of the most tabs opened ev3r! You see the little counter at the right bottom of the image. The TabCounter stat window is only displayed when you click the tab button On the bottom of the picture above you also see the very handy IE Tab. It is currently set to Firefox, but click it and it will render the active tab like Internet Explorer does. Can be very handy when there are stupid sites that aren't optimized for Firefox. Another slick tool is the Download Statusbar. It does open a new status bar above the regular one (but it auto-hides when not in use). It is very compact and packs in more useful features than the standard download window, including: -Stop downloads and save them for the next browser session. -Option to start virus scanner when a download completes. Finally, there's the mostly useless (except for web-techies) but fun Flagfox. Displays a country flag depicting the location of the current website's server and provides quick access to detailed location and webserver information. Now that you've messed up your toolbar it's time to organize, and that's where Organize Status Bar comes in. It's a bit user-unfriendly but it does manage to arrange the status bar as you see fit (mostly). Now if only I could add an addon that allowed me to put a few bookmarks, like buienradar, and the readability Annom posted, into the status bar of Firefox. Do you have any other gems that belong in the status bar? Please comment... (and I added the new tag Firefox (if you click on it you will find a few more Firefox addon related posts))

Cloud Timelapse part 2

Yes, another bloody cloud time lapse I made! Cybrbeast, I will use your music suggestions next time, they didn't really fit with these clouds imo so I used some corny Bach sounds. Please click title for full resolution.

Cumulonimbus Cloud from ISS

Here is another cumulonimbus.

Weather Phenomenon: Sun Dog

wiki A sun dog or sundog (scientific name parhelion, plural parhelia, for "beside the sun") is a common bright circular spot on a solar halo. It is an atmospheric optical phenomenon primarily associated with the reflection or refraction of sunlight by small ice crystals making up cirrus or cirrostratus clouds. Often, two sun dogs can be seen (one on each side of the sun) simultaneously.

Other weather phenomena on our blog: hole punch cloud, colored clouds, wave cloud, supercell, ice storm

Today's Clouds (Timelapse)

Go to YouTubeHD video. Click the link above for full youtube resolution. Go to YouTubeHD video.

Freak Wave

I thought this was quite an interesting documentary.

The world's oceans claim on average one ship a week, often in mysterious circumstances. With little evidence to go on, investigators usually point at human error or poor maintenance but an alarming series of disappearances and near-sinkings, including world-class vessels with unblemished track records, has prompted the search for a more sinister cause and renewed belief in a maritime myth: the wall of water. Waves the height of an office block. Waves twice as large as any that ships are designed to ride over.

Or you can download the torrent.

Cruise Ships vs Waves

Cruises don't have to be boring when you're in rough seas :) Watch this dining room turning into a disaster zone in 7 minutes. I recommend turning on some music as a sound track. It gets really freaky towards the end.

These are the kind of seas a cruise ship in that condition might be sailing through.

And this is what can happen to the pool in less rough seas.

Ice Storm over Geneva

After a conjunction of intense cold (-8 to -12 degrees Centigrade), plus very strong winds, blowing at over 100 kmh (70 mph), the waves got so harsh that they passed over the dikes and the droplets immediatly froze everything they touched !

More photos...

Sea of Clouds

A nice timelapse of a mountainous area filled by clouds. It really looks like the clouds are waves breaking on the mountains. Would be better with a nice soundtrack though.

Hole Punch Clouds

Cloud factory

While driving through Germany, I saw a few chimneys that created large clouds in a clear sky. I made a few pictures because I was impressed by these cloud factories.

Sometimes it rains cement

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian air force planes dropped a 25-kg (55-lb) sack of cement on a suburban Moscow home last week while seeding clouds to prevent rain from spoiling a holiday, Russian media said on Tuesday. "A pack of cement used in creating ... good weather in the capital region ... failed to pulverize completely at high altitude and fell on the roof of a house, making a hole about 80-100 cm (2.5-3 ft)," police in Naro-Fominsk told agency RIA-Novosti.

Chaiten Lightning

Another post on Chile's erupting Chaiten volcano. This must be one of the most stunning photos I've seen in a while.

As clouds of toxic ash and dust tower into the sky, they ionise the air, generating an explosive electrical storm. Colossal forks of lightning spark around the noxious plume as it spews from the volcano's crater, creating an image of raw, terrifying energy - as if the air itself were ablaze.

More pretty pictures and text here. Most recent news article.