The FBI is offering a $10,000 reward to anyone who provides information that leads to the arrest of people who point lasers at aircraft. Avid readers of The Vane will remember that this is a favorite tactic of certain paranoid conspiracy theorists.

The atmosphere is primed to spawn strong thunderstorms in the Mid-Atlantic this afternoon and evening, some of which could be severe with large hail, damaging winds, and even a couple of tornadoes possible. Since the storms will occur in heavily populated areas around rush hour, even a small, weak tornado could be dangerous.

It brings me happiness to report that Dear Leader Kim Jong-un has spoken about the most serious of issues regarding the weather forecasting situation in North Korea. Rodong Sinmun reports that Poppin' Fresh is quite pissed that his country's weather forecasts are inaccurate.

A commercial pilot in France took these absolutely stunning pictures of a supercell thunderstorm yesterday afternoon. On Monday, the western European country faced its second day of a powerful severe weather outbreak that dropped baseball to softball size hail near Paris.

The setting sun illuminates towering thunderstorms in the southeastern United States on Monday evening, the tops of which reach higher than 50,000 feet in some spots.

If a man tells himself a lie over and over again, eventually he will begin to believe it as fact. When the lie is something that fundamentally alters his view of reality, it can turn dangerous.

Colorado just can't catch a break. When it's not burning or flooding, it's catching hell from the sky, with hailstones the size of baseballs and a constant conga line of tornadoes raking the eastern half of the state. How common is extreme weather in Colorado, and is this the new normal?

Here are all of the severe thunderstorm (blue), tornado (red), and flash flood warnings (green) issued in the past 7 days. To say that this was an "active week" is an understatement. The past week has seen nearly 2,000 severe weather warnings go into effect, and this doesn't include the 200+ warnings that were issued on Sunday.

For the first time since the end of last November, there is finally no ice left on the Great Lakes. Goodbye and good riddance to the winter that just wouldn't die. Now that there's no more ice, what does this mean for weather patterns in the northern United States?

Oklahoma could see more than eight inches of rain over the next seven days if current forecasts hold true. That much rain over the Plains states would do wonders toward alleviating the extreme to exceptional drought plaguing the region.

This swirling mass of clouds off the coast of South Carolina this afternoon is the remnants of a system that just wouldn't quit — it's traveled almost 2,000 miles from Colorado to the Atlantic Ocean over the past two days, leaving a path of damage, injuries, and two fatalities in its wake.

The single greatest cultural event in American history is back for a second helping this July as Syfy gets ready to release Sharknado 2: The Second One. The tornado of sharkic proportions terrorizes New York City this time around, and if you liked/hated the first one, you will love/loathe the second one.

Storm chasing website Extreme Instability has some absolutely incredible pictures of hail damage he saw in Blair, Nebraska, which is where baseball to softball size hail fell on Tuesday. The hailstorm totaled cars, destroyed vegetation, and left homes looking like they were shelled by tanks.

A destructive line of thunderstorms is sweeping through the mid-South this afternoon, bringing with it incredibly strong straight-line winds in excess of 80 MPH. The system will come dangerously close to Memphis by 2:00PM CDT, and will enter northern Mississippi and Alabama over the next few hours.

The intense hailstorms that struck Colorado a couple of weeks ago left behind major damage to tens of thousands of cars, homes, airplanes, and just about everything else that wasn't protected from the stones that approached the size of tennis balls at times. Insured losses are now estimated to clock in at over $100 million.

A frustrating bureaucratic technicality led to a confusing situation this afternoon as a thunderstorm straddling state lines prompted the issuance of one of the most ridiculous-looking tornado warnings ever seen. The inconsistency has a good reason behind it, but these types of quirks can hurt public trust in weather forecasts.

What do you do when you're a major news organization that owns the Weather Channel and your social media editors use an old weather map to warn the wrong people that severe storms packing destructive winds and a gustnado are on their way to screw things up? Nothing, apparently.

A rare event known as a "heat burst" caused temperatures in Russell, Kansas last night to soar from 85° to 93° in less than an hour. To the east, Salina hit 95° at 1:00 AM. These phenomena usually occur in unpopulated areas, so not many people have heard of them. So, what is a heat burst, anyway?

This picture is exhibit A, and the only example you need. "This is what baseball-size hail and 70+ mph winds can do to a home," says the NWS office in Topeka of a picture of a house in Blair, Nebraska that did not fare well in today's storms.