This N That: Pretty Wild Storm Videos

It's a quiet Saturday morning, so time for a few random weather videos, right?   

Waterspout turns tornado and crashes ashore
in Sicily this past week. 

First off a technical announcement.  Blogger forced me to go on a new platform, essentially making me start this blog thingy from scratch as if I never previously had a blog. 

This new "improved" Blogger (by Google) is pretty clunky and hard to use, so please forgive all the hiccups you've been seeing here in the past few days. 

To best watch the videos in this post, click on the word "YouTube" at the bottom of each video to get a good look at what's going on. 

With that housekeeping done, on to the videos.

Recently, a waterspout moved onshore in Cefalu, Sicily. It's an illustration of why these should be taken seriously. People think that waterspouts - tornadoes over water - are harmless because they are weaker than on land tornadoes and that they dissipate before coming onshore. 

The reality is many waterspouts are full fledged, dangerous tornadoes. The one in Sicily actually seemed to intensify once it hit land.  News reports say the people in the video were not injured. Still, it looks scary! 

On to the next video:

Calgary, Alberta, Canada has had a terribly stormy summer, including a destructive hail storm in June that likely caused at least $1 billion in property damage. ..

On July 23, a supercell thunderstorm moved over Calgary. This storm had an impressive, rapidly rotating wall cloud that almost looked like a space ship hovering over the city.  The wall cloud came THIS CLOSE to producing a large tornado that would have caused widespread destruction around Calgary. 

Luckily the wall cloud could not quite get its act together, but this time lapse video shows how scary it looked: 

Colorado's Front Range, kind along the border between the High Plains and the Rocky Mountains, is prone to big time thunderstorms, often containing lots and lots of hail.  Let's just say that if you move to Colorado Springs, don't buy a house unless it has a garage in which you can stash your car. 

It seems like they get nailed every summer. Here's a news report about the latest round: