This is your annual reminder to set your clocks ahead one hour before you go to bed tonight, or at least do it before 2AM if you're going to be up partying all night or, if you're like me, scrolling through Tumblr because you have no life.
A new satellite launched by NASA at the end of February called Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) will revolutionize the way meteorologists and other scientists view precipitation here on Earth. The satellite has the capability to take a high-resolution picture of all the precipitation occurring on earth — from rain to snow and everything in between — every two to three hours.
Just before 8PM Eastern, the AP released a wire report that Malaysia Airlines reports that one of its Boeing 777-200 aircraft flying on the Kuala Lumpur-Beijing route as flight number 370 went "missing," as the airline lost contact with the aircraft and it never arrived in Beijing. The airline says that there are 239 people aboard the flight — 227 passengers and 12 crew members.
A meteor exploded in the skies over Yellowknife, Canada yesterday morning in a spectacular fireball that lit up the night sky like day and produced a sonic boom over the city several minutes later.
A major winter storm blasted parts of the southeast last night and this morning, bringing over half an inch of freezing rain in some areas and even over 6 inches of sleet (frozen raindrops that often freeze into a thick layer of ice) in one North Carolina town north of Greensboro.
Shelf clouds are a stunning feature of many spring and summertime thunderstorms that often pack more bark than bite. Other than for their incredible beauty, shelf clouds are usually newsworthy because they tend to freak people out.
[A person cycles through the fog in a park in Hanover, Germany, Thursday, March 6, 2014. (AP Photo/dpa, Peter Steffen)]
The brutal winter the eastern half of North America experienced this year took a heavy toll on the continent's Great Lakes. Since late December when the first "Polar Vortex" descended and wreaked havoc, ice cover on the Great Lakes skyrocketed and topped out in the 80% range in February. It has, for the most part, stayed there ever since.
A strong line of thunderstorms swept across southern and central Florida this afternoon, prompting the National Weather Service to issue severe thunderstorm and tornado warnings for some areas. A funnel cloud was spotted over the Tampa area earlier this afternoon, but the big threat with the storms is strong winds, heavy rain, and a veritable flood of social media posts documenting the imminent doom.
The Winter That's Never Gonna Freakin' End™ is taking a hefty toll on the nation's school systems, with a large number of counties that have had winter weather this season using all of their allotted snow days pretty quickly. Now that it's March and the snow and ice start to wane as spring approaches keep right on going like it's goddamn January, school boards just about everywhere have to tackle the problem of how to make up the days they've missed.
It's going to rain in Hogwarts.
It can be hard to realize how gorgeous the atmosphere is while you're trying to shovel your 1992 Ford Taurus out of knee-deep slush, but a pair of research satellites 438 miles up in space are indifferent to your suffering and take pictures to remind you of your home planet's beauty.
Like a jilted lover bent on revenge, The Weather Channel is far from getting over its nasty breakup with DirecTV this past January. The Atlanta-based weather network filed an official complaint with the Federal Communications Commission on February 7, alleging that its replacement network on DirecTV — WeatherNation, which broadcasts to over 20 million homes in the United States — puts deaf and hard of hearing viewers at risk with its sometimes wildly inaccurate closed captioning.
