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© Josh MyersFinger Lightning near the Aurora Reservoir
All of the tornadoes were southeast of Lamar. The National Weather Service says preliminary findings indicate five tornadoes touched down. Two were in Prowers County, two in Kiowa County and one in Bent County.
© Getty Images
The organisms, called salp, are small sea creatures with a consistency similar to jellyfish.
The influx of salp was discovered as part of the plant's routine monitoring system, according to Tom Cuddy, the senior manager of external and nuclear communications for the plant's operator, Pacific Gas & Electric.
"We then made the conservative decision to ramp down the affected unit to 20 percent and continued to monitor the situation," Cuddy said. "When the problem continued, we made another conservative decision that it would be safest to curtail the power of the unit."
The salp were clogging the traveling screens in the intake structure, which are meant to keep marine life out and to keep the unit cool.
© KIPLANG'AT KIRUIA man in Narok town tries save his chair from floods.
Already the floods-prone area of Budalangi has received floods alert after River Nzoia broke its banks. In Kisumu, heavy rains rendered hundreds homeless and destroyed a key road linking the city to Kisii town.
Viewers in Sevier County are reporting large hail stones, some as big as golf balls and baseballs, pounded the area Thursday afternoon.
Dispatchers reported they had received reports of vehicles being damaged in the Gatlinburg area. The area hardest hit was near the Food City, where firefighters said some of the hail was as large as baseballs. There were several reports of broken windows.
Dispatchers reported they had received reports of vehicles being damaged in the Gatlinburg area. The area hardest hit was near the Food City, where firefighters said some of the hail was as large as baseballs. There were several reports of broken windows.
© Nathan Gray, Anderson Independent MailLightning strikes near New Prospect Church Road and West Whitner Street during a thunderstorm Thursday morning.
Hail as big as golf balls was reported in the Townville area, along with smaller hail in Powdersville and Williamston, among other parts of the three counties.
"There's been some reports of Ping-Pong ball-sized hail and half-dollar-sized hail across the area," said National Weather Service meteorologist Doug Outlaw, based at the Greenville-Spartanburg airport.
© Tribune 242Bahamas Defence Force members help to repair a home whose roof was ripped off by the storm.
No injuries were reported but yesterday afternoon NEMA and the Bahamas Red Cross were conducting an initial assessment of homes near Malcolm Road - the area hardest hit by high wind gusts.
Meanwhile personnel from the Royal Bahamas Defence Force assisted residents who had their roof torn off by what was being described as a tornado by people in the area.
© 50mm via Flickr
Invasive insects may crop up where they haven't been seen before.
On Monday, Portland set a daily record for rainfall with 3.13 inches of rain, breaking the old record of 1.53 inches set in 1921, according to Margaret Curtis, meteorologist with the National Weather Service. Rainfall records go back to 1941.
© Sea Education AssociationGiora Proskurowski deploys a net collect samples that help estimate how much plastic debris is in the ocean.
Oceanographer Giora Proskurowski was sailing in the Pacific Ocean when he saw the small bits of plastic debris disappear beneath the water as soon as the wind picked up.
His research on the theory, with Tobias Kukulka of the University of Delaware, suggests that on average, plastic debris in the ocean may be 2.5 times higher than estimates using surface-water sampling. In high winds, the volume of plastic trash could be underestimated by a factor of 27, the researchers report this month in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
Plastic waste can wreak havoc on an ecosystem, harming fish and other organisms that ingest it, possibly even degrading a fish's liver; the trashy bits also make nice homes for bacteria and algae that get carried to other areas of the ocean where they could be invasive or cause other problems, the researchers noted.
In 2010, the team collected water samples at various depths in the North Atlantic Ocean. "Almost every subsurface tow we took had plastic in the net," Proskurowski told LiveScience, adding that they used a specialized tow net that isolated certain layers of the water, so it would only open at a specific depth and close before being pulled up.
Comment: It's not the first or second time something like this has happened. And we, at SOTT, wonder what exactly is going on.
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