A so-called "atmospheric river of rain" began falling on Northern California on Friday, bringing worries about flash floods, high winds and mudslides but offering little relief to a state that has been left parched by several years of drought.

The storm, also known as a "Pineapple Express" because it develops from a ribbon of moist air moving across the Pacific Ocean, was forecast to dump as much as 10 inches (25 cm) of rain in coastal mountains.

National Weather Service meteorologist Austin Cross said more than three inches (7.5 cm) of rain had been already recorded in the hills of western Sonoma County by early Friday afternoon.

Fire crews responded to flooding in Siskiyou County, near the Oregon border, placing sandbags to protect homes and minor mudslides were reported in Washington state. Flash flood advisories were also issued for Sonoma, Napa and Marin counties in Northern California.

High winds caused more than 80 flights be canceled and hundreds more delayed at San Francisco International Airport, knocked down trees and caused scattered power outages.

According to Pacific Gas and Electric, more than 114,000 homes and businesses lost power, although the majority of them had been restored by late-afternoon.

Hundreds of dead birds were found in an El Reno parking lot.

El Reno citizen Janince Wodrings told Passoth she like to watch the birds fly around near the Walmart on Country Club Drive just off I-40.

"Have you ever seen a school of fish? They will swirl and swoop, well that's the way the starlings look," Woodring said.

In the evening, they cover every tree and telephone wire. Most fly away during the day. That is when it is obvious that something is wrong. Friday morning, there were hundreds of dead grackle and starlings.

Thousands of starfish have been stranded on the beaches of South Padre Island after what investigators are calling a "perfect storm" for starfish.

It's thought that high winds and strong currents coincided exactly to wash up the creatures that had been close to shore feeding.

It's only the third time a case like this has ever been reported, the last being in 2009.

At first it was thought they were victims of the polar vortex, which swept the country during January but then investigators realised it was something else

A mother and her two daughters were taken to the hospital after being attacked by their own pit bull Thursday evening in McKinney.

The dog turned on the family just before 6 p.m. inside their home in the 3000 block of Kingsbury Drive, according to a McKinney police spokesperson.

One of the girls was attacked, but managed to escape the home with her sister.

One neighbor said she heard screams and saw the younger of the two girls bleeding in front of the home, with serious injuries to her lower legs.

Another neighbor was helping to apply pressure to her wounds.

The dog was still attacking the mother inside the home when officers arrived. Police said at least one officer shot and killed the dog to prevent further harm.

Three people were killed and another injured Friday after they were attacked by an elephant in West Bengal's Jalpaiguri district, a forest official said.

The incident happened when the tusker strayed into the Kathambari village under the under the Apalchand range of Baikunthapur forest division.

"The elephant had strayed into the village and attacked people killing three of them and injuring another. While one person was killed on the spot, two others succumbed to their injuries in a hospital," Divisional Forest Officer (Baikunthapur) P.R. Pradhan told IANS.

The victims have been identified as Rabin Orao, Surajit Katham and Benoy De Sarkar.

Forest officials later managed to push the animal back into the jungle.

Locals staged a demonstration outside the forest official office seeking compensation for the dead.

Source: Indo-Asian News Service

Spanish emergency services have rescued at least 220 people trapped by snow on roads in northern Spain.

Hundreds of cars were stuck for up to 17 hours overnight on roads between Cantabria and the province of Palencia.

Local media report temperatures of -15C (5F) and up 40cm (1.3ft) of snow.

Around 100 British expats and tourists were among those trapped. Spanish police rescued several stranded in their vehicles shortly after arrival in Santander by ferry from Portsmouth.

Many had come to Spain hoping for a warm-weather holiday, but ended up having to spend the night in the sports hall of a local school and the dining room of a hotel.

The country is in the middle of a cold spell that is expected to worsen over the next three days, with cold weather alerts issued for 20 provinces.

Heavy snow fell across northern and central Italy on Thursday, causing travel problems and some schools to close, while the south was hit by floods and landslides.

Snowfall blanketing parts of Italy hampered travel plans, causing trains in north-west Piedmont and Liguria to be cancelled. So far 35 trains have been affected, including those on the Genoa and Turin lines, Tgcom24 reported.

The cold snap has, however, been good news for skiers, with up to 60cm of snow falling in the mountainous Cuneo province by the French border. Schools in the area have been closed for the rest of the week, MeteoWeb said.

New data show strikingly regular patterns, from weeks to eons

From The Earth Institute at Columbia University:

Vast ranges of volcanoes hidden under the oceans are presumed by scientists to be the gentle giants of the planet, oozing lava at slow, steady rates along mid-ocean ridges. But a new study shows that they flare up on strikingly regular cycles, ranging from two weeks to 100,000 years - and, that they erupt almost exclusively during the first six months of each year. The pulses - apparently tied to short- and long-term changes in earth's orbit, and to sea levels - may help trigger natural climate swings. Scientists have already speculated that volcanic cycles on land emitting large amounts of carbon dioxide might influence climate; but up to now there was no evidence from submarine volcanoes. The findings suggest that models of earth's natural climate dynamics, and by extension human-influenced climate change, may have to be adjusted. The study appears this week in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.


"People have ignored seafloor volcanoes on the idea that their influence is small - but that's because they are assumed to be in a steady state, which they're not," said the study's author, marine geophysicist Maya Tolstoy of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. "They respond to both very large forces, and to very small ones, and that tells us that we need to look at them much more closely." A related study by a separate team this week in the journal Science bolsters Tolstoy's case by showing similar long-term patterns of submarine volcanism in an Antarctic region Tolstoy did not study.

Volcanically active mid-ocean ridges crisscross earth's seafloors like stitching on a baseball, stretching some 37,000 miles. They are the growing edges of giant tectonic plates; as lavas push out, they form new areas of seafloor, which comprise some 80 percent of the planet's crust. Conventional wisdom holds that they erupt at a fairly constant rate - but Tolstoy finds that the ridges are actually now in a languid phase. Even at that, they produce maybe eight times more lava annually than land volcanoes. Due to the chemistry of their magmas, the carbon dioxide they are thought to emit is currently about the same as, or perhaps a little less than, from land volcanoes - about 88 million metric tons a year. But were the undersea chains to stir even a little bit more, their CO2 output would shoot up, says Tolstoy.

Not only was this weekend's blizzard the 5th largest snowstorm in the city's history, it also made the past week the 8th snowiest week on record for Chicago.

According to the National Weather Service, a total of 21.3 inches of snow was measured at O'Hare from Jan. 29 through Feb. 4. Virtually all of that - 19.3 inches - came during the snowstorm that started Saturday night and ended Monday morning.

Also thanks to the blizzard, this February is already the 10th snowiest on record in Chicago, with more than three weeks left until the end of the month.

With 36.7 inches of snow so far this winter in Chicago, we've already reached the normal snowfall for the entire average winter season in Chicago, meaning - despite no measurable snow in December - Chicago is virtually assured of having above normal snowfall this winter.

There will be a nice break from the snow during the next couple days. CBS 2 Meteorologist Megan Glaros reports no precipitation is expected for the next 24 to 48 hours.

While Thursday is the first time in the past eight days that Chicago won't get any snow, temperatures plunged below zero overnight.

Shortly before 8 a.m., the temperature dipped to 2 below zero at O'Hare International Airport, with a wind chill of 10 below.

It was even colder in some outlying suburbs, Thursday morning, with temperatures of as low as 14 below in Kankakee, and 16 below in Aurora.

The frigid conditions won't last long though. While Thursday's high will be only about 16 degrees, temperatures will return closer to normal the next several days, with a high of 32 on Friday, 35 on Saturday, and 32 on Sunday. Next week will start about the same, with highs in the upper 20s or lower 30s through Wednesday.

Water vapor - Mississippi River-size amounts of it flowing at hurricane speeds miles above the Earth - is hurtling across the Pacific, an atmospheric river poised to drench a parched Northern California and the Sacramento region as early as Thursday night.

A crack team of science experts is going along for the ride, part of an experiment known as CalWater 2015, many of whom gathered at McClellan Park near Sacramento on Tuesday in preparation for the major weather event and the vital information they hope to pull from the phenomenon.

"It's a real milestone for us. Nothing of this scope has happened," said Marty Ralph, director of the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, of the project he's helping to lead. "One of the drivers of CalWater was the uncertainty of climate projections. We haven't had the data to measure the strength and structure of ARs. ... There's so much potential for the monitoring of atmospheric rivers."

They come from an alphabet soup of agencies, universities and scientific institutes, from NOAA to NASA, USGS and the DOE, to study atmospheric rivers and the role they play in water supply. The researchers will cast a wide net from the Sierra Nevada to the Coast Range and into the Pacific Ocean during a storm system that CalWater forecasters said will produce "copious" amounts of rain into Saturday.

"There will be ample opportunity to store this water, hopefully, and provide a little relief from the drought," said Allen White, a research meteorologist at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration.

The information the scientists glean, they hope, will help do nothing less than predict the future of water and weather in a California at the mercy of both. Think of atmospheric rivers as a massive water vapor pipeline, responsible for many of the major storms along the West Coast and about half of the rain and snow Northern California sees each year.

Knowing how atmospheric rivers are formed, how strong they are and where they will land can help communities and water experts in California and the West. They can better plan for water storage, storm and disaster preparedness, drought and climate change.