Several cars of the New York City-bound Amtrak train with 218 people aboard flew off the tracks in South Carolina early Monday in freezing conditions. No one was seriously hurt but four passengers were taken to hospital with minor injuries after the derailment, in which seven cars left the track but thankfully remained upright.

Witnesses described terrifying scenes as the train tilted, bags flew around and jolted passengers clung to each other just after midnight on Train 20 from New Orleans.
Passenger Carrie Lambert told The Associated Press that she was at the back of the train when she felt the car start to sway and then tilt. 'The car felt like it was about to flip over... I was holding on to my brother for dear life,' the Atlanta woman told AP by phone. 'Bags went everywhere. It was crazy. Really scary.'

Rain records are falling like, well, rain, around Arizona on Friday, the start of a what is expected to be a very wet weekend.
More than an inch of rain has dropped on Sky Harbor Airport, the most in a single day since 1973. The previous mark was a half-inch. The airport rain gauge hadn't measured any rain since Sept. 9. Rain began falling Thursday night.

The National Weather Service in Phoenix has issued a flood watch, which will be in effect until 11 p.m. Heavy rain has already forced closure of southbound Loop 303 from Peoria Avenue to Camelback Road. Motorists had already been trapped in flooded areas before 7 a.m.

Snow and whiteout conditions were reported on State Route 87 north of Flagstaff. Thursday, Yuma broke a 129-year-old single-day mark with more than a third of an inch. Forecasters said the storm system from the West could last 18 hours.

Half a year's worth of rain fell in an hour and a half Monday night in the Italian island of Sardinia, flooding streets and killing at least 16 people.

Sardinia was pummeled by 17.3 inches of rain Monday by Cyclone Cleopatra, a drenching that Franco Gabrielli, head of Italy's Civil Protection Agency, called "an exceptional event." According to Italy's Civil Protection Agency, so far 2,500 people have been displaced by the storm and more than 10,000 have lost electricity. The Italian government has declared a state of emergency on the island and has allocated about $27 million in rescue and relief aid.

Marco Vargiu, councilor for tourism in Olbia, a Sardinian city, told CNN that the city had been among the hardest hit - in some places in the city, water levels reached 10 feet.

"The worst conditions are here in Olbia," he said. "There are rivers of water in the town. In lots of houses the ground floors are full of water, one or two meters of water, and a lot of families have lost everything - their house, their car, their clothes, the furniture."

Gianni Giovannelli, Olbia's mayor, said the rain was so intense that it was like a "water bomb" and described the storm as "apocalyptic."

Sardinia wasn't the only region hit hard by flooding this week. Over the weekend, four people were killed when 0.79 inches of rain fell over 12 hours in the Saudi Arabian capital of Riyadh. The rainfall tally may not seem like much, but it's double the average November rainfall for the city. And since Riyadh has a desert climate, seemingly small amounts of rain can be cause for major concern.

"Typically, desert cities do not invest the same resources in drainage as do cities in wetter climates - much as warm-weather cities do not invest much in snowplows or road salt," weather.com meteorologist Nick Wiltgen said. "As a result, rainfall amounts that might seem numerically insignificant in a place like Miami or New York can lead to major impacts in a desert metropolis."

Aerial photos of Washington, Illinois, show the heartbreaking scale of the description visited on the town after tornadoes touched down there Sunday night.

Eighty one separate twisters were reported across the Midwest. The devastating storm outbreak brought winds of up to 200mph that flattened hundreds of homes and killed six people.

Residents of Washington, a downstate town of 15,000, were left to pick up the pieces Monday and begin recovering from the disaster.

Bits of American flags and insulation from destroyed houses clung to trees that had been stripped of most of their branches and remaining leaves by the twister.

After one of the quietest U.S. tornado seasons in 40 years, Sunday was nature's comeback, with a total of 81 tornado reports in Illinois, Kentucky, Missouri, Indiana and Ohio.

Illinois was the hardest hit, with 43 tornadoes, followed by 23 in Indiana, 13 in Kentucky, one in Missouri and one in Ohio.

According to the National Weather Service's preliminary ratings, New Minden, Ill., in the southern part of the state, was in the swirl of an EF4 tornado, with winds of at least 166 mph. In Washington, Ill., the tornado, also an EF4, packed even more force, with winds from 170 to 190 mph.

According to the climatology of U.S. tornadoes in the Midwest, twisters of such force were unusual for this time of year. In the lower 48 states, the peak of severe weather and tornadoes usually occurs in April and May; November is known as the second peak for severe weather.

Flooding in Vietnam has killed at least 28 people since Friday, with nine others missing and nearly 80,000 displaced, state media and government reports said, after a tropical depression dumped heavy rains across central regions of the country.

In Quang Ngai province, where nine were killed and four people are missing, flood waters rose above a previous peak measured in 1999, submerging many houses, the official Thanh Nien (Young People) newspaper reported on Sunday.

Flood waters rose quickly after 15 hydro power plants in the central region opened their sluice gates to release water in reservoir protection, the newspaper reported.

Around 100,000 houses were submerged and nearly 80,000 people have been evacuated, the government-run committee on floods and storm protection said in a report. Roads have been closed due to floods and some national train services canceled.

As the title indicates, so far this month, we've seen more extreme weather, more sinkholes, a volcano erupting that had been dormant for 400 years, more fireballs, UFOs and strange 'sky' sounds. They're all definitely signs of the times!

"Chaotic wind velocities associated with the rotating turbine blades triggers the doppler radar mesocyclone detection algorithm"

Note: this essay was written by the National Weather Service Forecast Office in Burlington, Vermont and tipped to me by a reader. Vermont's wind farm acreage pales in comparison to places like the Texas and Oklahoma, where there are literally thousands of acres of wind farms right in the middle of tornado alley. I've been there and seen them firsthand.

Certified Consulting Meteorologist Mike Smith writes:

"While driving to Norman, OK recently I saw the newest "wind farm" to the west of Interstate 35 southwest of Tonkawa. Wind farms show up as bright ground clutter on weather radars and here it is."

One has to wonder just how much trouble wind farms are causing the nation's doppler radar warning system. It looks like a classic case of the law of unintended consequences at work. - Anthony



National Weather Service WSR-88D Radar and Wind Farm Impacts

Introduction

The most valuable tool used by the National Weather Service (NWS) to detect precipitation is the radar. Radar stands for Radio, Detection, and Ranging, and has been used to detect precipitation since the 1940′s, with most of the technology coming from the military.

Survivor of what may be the strongest storm ever to make landfall tells of terrible destruction in Tacloban City

Only when Lynette Lim started to walk into Tacloban City, a few hours after 'Super' Typhoon Haiyan wreaked unimaginable devastation across the Philippines, did she realise how lucky she herself had been to survive the storm.

"Everything was just flattened," said Miss Lim, the Asia communications manager for Save the Children, who arrived in Tacloban with a group of aid workers assessing the potential need for help just 24 hours before Haiyan smashed into the city on Friday.

"The water was knee high and there were bodies floating in the streets. I saw several dead children. I'd say two out of every five corpses I saw were kids. Most of the houses were wooden and they were completely destroyed.

"There were trees and electrical poles strewn across the road and corrugated iron roofing that had been ripped off houses."

Making her way through the villages south of Tacloban, she discovered the full extent of the horrific damage caused by winds that came close to 200mph, and storm surges that sent waves as high as the second storey of houses crashing ashore.

"Everywhere we went, people told us between 10 and 50 people had been killed in their communities," said Miss Lim. "Most of the families who had decided to evacuate ahead of the storm left one member behind to guard their homes and possessions. Unfortunately, most of them died."

A slow-moving tropical storm pounded the Somalia coast this weekend, a rare hit for the war-torn country that killed more than 100 people and devastated coastal communities.

The unnamed tropical storm made landfall on Sunday (Nov. 10) north of Eyl in the Puntland state, a semiautonomous region that typically receives less than 10 inches (25 centimeters) of rain every year.

The storm, designated Tropical Cyclone 03A, was forecast to dump a year's worth of rain on Puntland this week and hit the shore with winds of 46 mph (74 km/h).

Weak storms such as Cyclone 3A can wreak havoc along the arid African coast because they trigger flash floods, said Amato Evan, an atmospheric scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego.

"Even a very weak storm can cause huge damage and loss of life in this area," Evan told LiveScience. "In an area that doesn't receive a lot of rainfall in general, a storm that moves very, very slowly and dumps a lot of rain in one place for a long time can be particularly deadly."