After a long period without any severe weather, the atmosphere appears primed for a potentially dangerous severe weather outbreak tomorrow across areas from Kansas to Minnesota. Some areas could see tornadoes, baseball-size hail, and winds in excess of 75 MPH.

CBS News published an article this afternoon reporting on a super rare "sideways tornado" spotted in Maryland. The only problem is that there is no such thing as a sideways tornado, and apparently CBS has no meteorologists (or elementary school graduates) on its payroll to fact check this sideways article.

A severe weather outbreak is ramping up over parts of the eastern United States this afternoon, with an area that doesn't typically see much severe weather bearing the brunt of today's action. The risk for EF-2 or stronger tornadoes is 1000 times higher than normal in some spots.

Over the past twelve years, we've seen tens of thousands of tornado warnings across the United States. Almost every major city east of the Rocky Mountains has seen a tornado warning at some point since 2002, and the resulting maps are pretty cool looking.

A surveillance camera in a Farmer's Co-Op Store in Pilger, Nebraska caught the terrifying moment that one of the twin EF-4 tornadoes swept through the town last month, demolishing a large part of the building in mere seconds.

When the forecast calls for a 30% chance of rain, it's reasonable to think that the chances of seeing rain are 3 out of 10. But when the forecast calls for a 30% chance of tornadoes, the risk is much higher and much more dangerous. Why is there such a discrepancy between severe weather and rain forecasts?

This map shows the tracks of all 59,036 recorded tornadoes that touched down in the United States between January 3, 1950 and December 21, 2013. The end result looks like a Jackson Pollock painting.

Even though 2014 is another relatively quiet year for tornado activity, it's pretty interesting to see which areas of the country were most heavily affected by the couple of tornado outbreaks we've seen over the past six months.

In the past year, two high-profile television meteorologists have told people to evacuate from the relative safety of their homes to get out of the way of an oncoming tornado. That is the worst thing you could do, and this dangerous advice will get people killed one day.

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.

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.

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?

The Storm Prediction Center is forecasting a major severe weather outbreak in the Central Plains and Midwest today, which could include strong tornadoes, damaging winds, and large hail. There's some uncertainty in the forecast, but severe weather indices are off the charts and if the storms form, they could mean business.

Imagine being the person who can save an entire city's population from injury and death with just a few clicks of your mouse. This simulator from the National Weather Service lets you test your abilities and see if you've got what it takes to do just that.

A security camera outside the St. Luke United Methodist Church captured the Tupelo, Mississippi tornado as it hit the building, raining debris down onto the playground outside. The video shows how conditions can go from calm to destruction in a matter of seconds.

During the recent severe storms, weather geeks were posting radar images all over social media. Since not everyone is a weather geek, one of the most common questions people asked was "what am I looking at?" Fear not — here's how you can see a tornado using weather radar.