Typhoon Soudelor poses a grave threat to Taiwan later this week as the powerful tropical cyclone swirls closer to the island off the southeast coast of China. The storm has weakened since it produced 180 MPH winds on Monday, but it’s predicted to restrengthen to a destructive category four before landfall on Friday.

Social media is flooded with fake and misleading weather forecasts created by untrained, uninformed, and often underage individuals we like to call “weather weenies.” We try like hell to curtail their damaging hoaxes, but one country went a step further: beginning on Friday, weather weenies are outlaws in China.

The federal government dropped charges against an accused National Weather Service hydrologist last week, five months after she was arrested and charged with illegally accessing and downloading restricted information about the country's dams.

Beneath a sky that makes a locker room full of Axe Body Spray seem like a breath of fresh air, the air quality sensor at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing has measured off-the-chart levels of fine particulate pollution twice in 24 hours. The first reading showed an air quality index of 586, or simply "beyond index."

The Washington Post published a report today stating that Chinese hackers infiltrated NOAA's satellite network in September, resulting in a multi-day data outage when the agency reacted to the breach in October. The agency failed to report the incident to the Commerce Department until November 4.

Super Typhoon Rammasun made landfall in southeastern China earlier on Friday with winds of 155 MPH, making the storm equivalent to that of a borderline category 5 hurricane in the Atlantic. Satellite and radar imagery coming from the storm are downright impressive, showing Rammasun's nearly-perfect structure.