When Hurricane Arthur made landfall on the North Carolina coast last weekend, it was the strongest hurricane to strike the United States since Hurricane Ike hit Texas in 2008. The storm was downright impressive visually, and these gifs document the latent beauty of nature's power.

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.

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.

A well-defined low pressure system over Texas and Oklahoma this afternoon is producing an awesome sight on satellite imagery, including a classic comma shape and even an eye-like feature in the middle of it.

A non-tropical low pressure system is swirling off the coast of New England this evening. It's not very strong — only 1004 millibars — but it looks pretty cool on visible satellite imagery.

The satellite and radar images coming out of Tuesday's severe weather is approaching "map porn" caliber for weather geeks. The top of this post features a high-resolution satellite image of the central United States, showing severe thunderstorms over Iowa and Illinois, as well as a stubborn and intense supercell near Denver, Colorado.

A line of thunderstorms over one thousand miles long spreads eastward across the center of the country on Monday evening along the leading edge of a cold front. If you're one to look for shapes in the clouds, see if you can spot the dragon.

The University of Wisconsin is one of the best sources for awesome weather images on the internet, and one of the gems on their website shows animated loops of water vapor flowing across the world's oceans. They're absolutely mesmerizing to watch.

A high resolution satellite image of the thunderstorms that produced historic amounts of rain on the northern Gulf Coast on Tuesday. Pensacola recorded over 15" of rain and Mobile recorded nearly 12". When the storms first began, Mobile Regional Airport recorded rainfall rates of 12 inches per hour for a few minutes.

A large low pressure system sitting over the southeastern United States is creating quite the sight on satellite imagery this afternoon as it wraps dry air into its core. This is a water vapor image from the GOES satellite, showing the moisture in the atmosphere around 10,000 feet up. Warmer colors indicate drier air, and cooler colors indicate moist air.

Here's a look at the visible satellite imagery across the United States this afternoon. Generally a cloudy/rainy Friday across much of the country, especially in the southeast where 4-6 inches of rain is possible by tomorrow afternoon.

A large rooster-shaped cloud appeared over Arkansas today. Nature follows our calendar, after all.

Satellite images over the past few weeks have been anything but boring, and last night's thunderstorms were no exception. A weakening squall line moving through Illinois and Missouri formed into almost a perfect cane shape as the northern end wrapped around a strengthening low west of Chicago.

The long-awaited nor'easter is finally cranking off the coast of New England this afternoon, and it really looks about as beautiful as expected on both satellite imagery and surface pressure analysis maps.

Satellites are an integral part of life these days, from meteorologists tracking storm systems to spying on your neighbors in Google Earth. When Malaysia Airlines 370 went missing a few weeks ago, investigators turned to satellite imagery to aid search and rescue teams spot any possible wreckage in the ocean. While crews are using the blurry images as possible leads to search for debris, people on social media want to know why we can't see the objects more clearly from space.

This satellite image shows strong extratropical cyclone (pressure of ~960 millibars) as it swirls south of the Kamchatka Peninsula in the northwestern Pacific Ocean on March 21, 2014. A very long, well-defined front extends from the low over 3,500 miles southward towards the Philippines. The front is mostly a cold front, but it transitions into a stationary front as it starts to take on an east-west orientation at lower latitudes.

[Ice on Lakes Huron and Erie begins to break up, while Lake Ontario remains virtually ice-free on March 18, 2014. Image via MODIS Today and visualized in Google Earth.]

A cool feature of strong cold fronts as they move over open water is the large area of cloud streets they can leave behind. As the cold, dry air interacts with the warmer ocean water, it creates narrow bands of convection (rising and sinking air) parallel to the direction of the wind. If conditions are right, these narrow bands of convection sometimes appear in the form of long, thin rows of cumulus clouds known as "horizontal convective rolls," or cloud streets.

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.

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.