An Arizona state senator scheduled a hearing this week about the "chemtrails" epidemic plaguing the area around Lake Havasu. A local newspaper wrote about the conspiracy theory as if it were fact, and further down the anti-science rabbit hole we go.

Today is the first day of summer. There are 185 shopping days left until Christmas. All the cool kids are asking their parents for fashionable sling psychrometers this year. Hint hint.

One of the go-to "fun facts" of the weather so far this year is that tornado activity is well below average, with this year's preliminary tornado reports clocking in nearly 400 below normal. This week, though, proves more than ever that it only takes one tornado to make it a bad year.

In an ever-growing effort to provide valuable weather information — or just a vulgar display of automated GIS skills — the National Weather Service is tweeting out images that show how many people are impacted by severe weather. The exercise shows just how little of the United States is populated.

"Have storm chasers gone too far?" Eric Holthaus wrote a great piece at Slate about the ethics of storm chasing after a string of ugly incidents surrounding the hobby, the latest of which involved the circumstances surrounding a photo of a dying five-year-old in Nebraska.

It's hot. Not hot hot, but hot. There's hot and hot hot and dry hot and wet hot and comfortable hot and miserable hot. But what, exactly, is hot?

The neighbourhood of East Village in Calgary, Alberta regretfully informs the public that rain has cancelled tonight's yoga session. It will be held next Tuesday. Here at The Vane, we care about the physical and spiritual fitness of our friends north of the border, so for our diehard readers in East Village, you may use the above video as a substitute for tonight's cancelled yoga. Bless.

One of the best technological advances in the past year didn't involve any new technology at all — the advance is the result of an ingenious programming tweak developed by the National Weather Service. It will ultimately save thousands of lives over the coming years.

Just weeks after saying he wanted to see "some highly destructive tornadoes to make it rain for me financially," a storm chaser's picture of a dying 5-year-old tornado victim is spreading rapidly, and the chaser has had to defend himself for choosing to publish it.

Almost everyone now knows that an extremely rare pair of tornadoes formed in Nebraska yesterday, destroying one small town and heavily damaging another. The side-by-side tornadoes are so rare that there are hardly any records of them happening before. How did these rare twin twisters form?

A storm in Nebraska produced an extremely rare pair of tornadoes this evening as it tracked through the northeastern part of the state. Multiple vortices are common in the strongest tornadoes (think Joplin), but two large, distinct tornadoes side-by-side like this is almost unprecedented.

A summary of today's forecast is a copy/paste of almost all spring severe weather: storms this afternoon could produce significant tornadoes in the upper Midwest before merging into a line and becoming a straight-line wind threat. You know the drill. Please don't hide under a bridge.

Yesterday's severe weather in the central Plains lived up to expectations. The outbreak resulted in around 340 reports of severe weather across ten states, including numerous reports of baseball size hail and damaging winds up to 89 MPH in some spots. The hail was a product of supercells that formed during the afternoon hours, which quickly merged into a very well-organized squall line during the overnight hours and produced a fair amount of wind damage across Nebraska and Kansas.

The Storm Prediction Center has issued a moderate risk for severe weather from Kansas to Iowa this afternoon, as they anticipate strong supercells to develop. These storms will be capable of producing hail larger than baseballs, damaging winds, and possibly a couple of tornadoes.

A line of severe thunderstorms is moving into the New York City metro area from the west, and should start to threaten the city itself around 6:00PM. The storms are capable of producing damaging straight-line winds in excess of 60 MPH, as well as torrential rainfall and "continuous cloud-to-ground lightning."

Everyone jokes that when hurricane season arrives, all you see on The Weather Channel are ads for Home Depot and batteries. Well, they really do target advertising based on the seasons, and now they're going to use your location on Twitter to show you ads tailored to your current weather.

A meteorologist on board an American Eagle jet taxiing to the runway in Abilene, Texas yesterday took a video of golf ball size hail pounding the Embraer ERJ-145 for more than seven minutes while they sat on the taxiway. The plane had to turn back to the gate because of the damage.

The country's official weather forecasting agency keeps losing its communications during severe weather events, making it virtually impossible to issue life-saving warnings in some cases. This inexcusable weakness in its infrastructure will lead to people's deaths if they don't fix it now and it goes out again during a future emergency.

You get a see text and you get a see text and you get a see text! The Storm Prediction Center's rendition of Oprah's Car Giveaway is one of the best arguments for their soon-to-launch updated forecast categories that will get rid of the silly "see text" business.

The internet is saturated with websites that give you weather information, and frankly, most of them suck. Very few allow you to see lightning around the world in real-time, and even fewer give you this data for free. But there is one nugget of gold tucked deep in the confines of Europe that gives you the best of the best, all for free.