A rare tornado damaged dozens of homes in Northern California, sending roof tiles and solar panels flying.

Source: CBS News

These two intrepid news reporters certainly earned their money this week.

This incredible video shows the moment severe snow storm conditions actually blew Mark Robinson and Chris Scott out of shot while doing pieces to camera.

Coincidentally the pair were explaining that the winds had got up to 170km/h when they knocked off their feet.

"The only storm I can compare this too is a hurricane," one can be heard saying.

"This has the added bonus of having the snow in the air... like standing in a sand blaster," they say before being literally blown away.

Unsurprisingly the clip has proved popular online with over 85,000 people tuning in less than a day.

As spring arrives - albeit slowly - East Coasters are saying goodbye a to an especially punishing winter.

Those feeling sentimental can relive the endless series of snowstorms and fiendishly cold weather in a new time-lapse video from NASA.

The animation stiches together imagery taken from space by NOAA's GOES-East satellite every day from January 1 to March 24, 2014.


The creator, Dennis Chesters, of the NASA/NOAA GOES Project at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., said in a statement: "The once-per-day imagery creates a stroboscopic slide show of persistent brutal winter weather."

And brutal it was. Cold air escaping the polar vortex repeatedly blasted Canada and the continental United States. Two inches of snow humbled Atlanta in late January, creating epic traffic jams stranding hundreds of people in their cars for hours. Ice storms that followed in February left thousands without power in Georgia and South Carolina. The Great Lakes' ice cover reached historic levels, growing to 91 percent in early March.

Major cities reported astounding tallies of winter snow. Residents of Washington, D.C. saw 30.3 inches (76.9 centimeters) of snow during the 2013-2014 season - nearly double the city's average snowfall of 15.3 inches (38.8 cm), according to the National Weather Service. A whopping 80 inches (203 cm) of snow fell on Chicago, far exceeding the typical 34.4 inches (87.3 cm).

The GOES-East satellite is perched in a geostationary orbit, meaning it hovers over the same part of the globe all the time, moving in tandem with Earth's rotation. The spacecraft captures images of the Northern Hemisphere every half hour and then takes a shot of the entire Western Hemisphere every three hours, according to NOAA.

The images of clouds taken by the GOES satellite are used by the National Weather Service to monitor storms. The 2014 winter weather video also incorporates true-color imagery of the land and sea obtained with NASA's Earth-watching NASA's Aqua and Terra satellites.

Mother Nature proceeds to show no mercy, as only a few days after the official start of spring, the East Coast was blasted with yet another major snowstorm.

Spanning from Virginia up through New England and parts of Atlantic Canada, the system brought snow to regions in Maryland and Washington, D.C., before heading up the coast and slamming Cape Cod, Mass., with blizzard conditions.

Grounding flights, causing traffic accidents and knocking out power to nearly 6,000 people throughout Massachusetts, the storm was accompanied by howling winds that gusted up to more than 80 mph in Nantucket.

The severity of the winds also generated dangerous travel conditions, as blowing and drifting snow whipped the island and surrounding areas.

As the storm moves out of the United States and into Atlantic Canada, the Maritimes and western Newfoundland, it will be accompanied by hurricane-force winds, producing treacherous travel conditions.

March came in like a lion, and it looks like the lion isn't leaving, but you can't blame the "polar vortex" this time.

As a massive winter storm at sea known as a Nor'easter prepares to skirts the Northeast coast of the USA, bringing with it high seas and bitterly cold weather in its wake, Dr. Ryan Maue writes:

Massive Nor'easter will develop a warm-core thru a seclusion process.

Compare previous image w/Hurricane Sandy - same 850-mb Wind speed & MSLP. Nor'easter wind field much stronger/larger.

[It is] maybe 4 times more powerful than Sandy based on integrated KE of wind field.

The image of the storm is quite stunning for it's sheer size.

An animal horn thought to be 3,000 years old has been found on a beach in Gwynedd after the recent storms.

Engineer Derfel Hughes from Rhos Isaf made the discovery while walking at Dinas Dinlle, near Caernarfon.

Mr Hughes checked with museum experts who reckon it belonged to giant wild cattle called aurochs which became extinct in the 17th Century.

He gave it to a friend at the Greenwood Forest Park tourist attraction in Y Felinheli where it could go on show.

"Finding it was a total fluke," Mr Hughes told the Daily Post.

"I just happened to be in the right place at the right time

This stunning image of a lightning strike over Kuwait was captured last December by an astronaut aboard the International Space Station (ISS) and released today (March 24) by NASA's Earth Observatory. The ISS recently installed a new instrument to help study the physics and composition of such bolts in detail on a daily basis.

Lightning bolts flash across Earth's atmosphere as often as 50 times per second, which adds up to about 4.3 million times a day and 1.5 billion times a year, NASA officials wrote in an image description. Some of those strikes emit gamma radiation - a type of radiation more commonly associated with exploding stars and nuclear fusion - in bursts known as terrestrial gamma-ray flashes (TGFs). The scientists will use the new lightning imagery and data from the ISS to try to understand what triggers lightning during storms in general, and what causes these rarer bursts of TGFs. [Electric Earth: Stunning Images of Lightning]

"The fact that TGFs exist at all is amazing," Doug Rowland, a space physicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center involved in this new lighting research, said in a statement. "The electron and gamma-ray energies in TGFs are usually the domain of nuclear explosions, solar flares, and supernovas. What a surprise to find them shooting out of the cold upper atmosphere of our own planet."

A man is dead, a truck driver has severe injuries and two people have been struck by lightning as wild weather battered Sydney.

A month's worth of rain fell on parts of the city on Monday afternoon when an area of low pressure passed slowly over the city towards the Illawarra.

Sydney's south bore the brunt and at Lucas Heights a man died after being washed into a stormwater drain.

Paramedics were called to the Lucas Heights waste management and recycling centre on New Illawarra Road at 3.15pm, but were unable to save the man. He died at the scene and is believed to have drowned.

"Unfortunately there was nothing we could do," a NSW ambulance spokesman said.

New evidence has shown that Ireland experienced 20 years of non-stop rain in 2345BC, around the same time as Noah's great flood.

Did you know that Ireland experienced non-stop rain for 20 years?

While our less-than-brilliant weather may make this feel like a very recent event, it actually happened way back in 2345BC.

According to evidence uncovered in this Sunday's 'Secret's of the Irish Landscape' programme on RTÉ One, this period of non-stop rainfall makes it possible that the biblical story of Noah's great flood really did happen.

Professor Mike Baillie from Queen's University in Belfast has proven that the 20-year flood coincided with the traditional date for Noah's flood.

"According to the ancient Annals of the Four Masters, the whole of Ireland had to be evacuated at this time," Baillie said.

We believe this global event was caused by a big explosive volcanic eruption which loaded the atmosphere with dust to reflect the sunlight away and cause widespread cooling at the earth's surface.

Baillie has also discovered that freak weather events such as these tend to happen every thousand years or so.

With Ireland experiencing its last one in 540AD - when it rained for 10 years straight - the downpour to end all downpours is long overdue.

Lightning killed 114 sheep and 12 cows in an Aymara village in the Bolivian Andes, an official in the area said.

Dead sheep were scattered on the hill with the charred wool, said Friday by telephone to The Associated Press Panfilo Chura, secretary of the mayor of Achacachi, 80 kilometers north of La Paz where the community Yacachi Grande is located in which the phenomenon occurred on Thursday afternoon.

The lightning was so loud that it seemed that the sky was broken, a witness told the PAT television. The roar threw down the shepherd and flock Angelino Ventura, 80, who was unhurt owner. Ventura broke down in tears on Friday and said he lost all his cattle.