• First ever firenado warning in California as wildfires rage into third day
• Record outbreak of 84 waterspouts last week over the Great Lakes
• Spectacular waterspout swirls across sky off West Flanders, Belgium

The accumulation of cometary dust in the Earth's atmosphere plays an important role in the increase of tornadoes, cyclones, hurricanes and their associated rainfalls, snowfalls and lightning. To understand this mechanism we must first take into account the electric nature of hurricanes, tornadoes and cyclones, which are actually manifestations of the same electric phenomenon at different scales or levels of power. Because of this similarity, we will refer to these three phenomena collectively as 'air spirals' in the following discussion.

McCanney [in his book Planet-X, Comets and Earth Changes] describes the electric nature of hurricanes in these terms:

A simple model showed that these [tropical] storms formed when electrical currents connected between the ionosphere and the top of the clouds. [...] the reason hurricanes lost power when they approached land was that the powering electrical current from the ionosphere to the cloud tops and to the Earth's surface had no connection (anode) while over the ocean so it drew up vast surface areas of ionized air from the ocean surface and sucked them up a central column (the spinning vortex was caused by the moist air rising 'up the drain')  whereas the land provided a 'ground' for the current and therefore it shunted out the storm's power source. [...] I also calculated that the warm water theory for hurricane development lacked sufficient energy to account for the energy in these massive storms. We later witnessed hurricanes on Mars where there is no water at all. Clearly, the warm water concept did not work [...]¹

From this perspective, air spirals are simply the manifestation of electric discharges between the ionosphere and the Earth's surface. The image above shows a waterspout and a lightning bolt occurring in the same place at the same time, suggesting that indeed electric potential difference between the clouds at the top of the picture and the ground at the bottom is what powers both the lightning and the tornado.This additional feature of dust particles - their ability to carry an electric charge - means that dust accumulation enables any given area of the atmosphere to carry potentially massive electric charges, which can differ from the charge of adjacent regions, from the charge of the ionosphere and from the charge of the Earth's surface.

• 3 tornadoes hit Delaware in a week, normally sees 1 a year - Philadelphia region rainfall nearly 1,000% of normal
• 43% of Iowa corn, soybean crop hit by Monday's storm
• Record outbreak of 84 waterspouts last week over the Great Lakes