Residents of Oklahoma and Texas may need to watch the skies en route to holiday shopping or partying on Saturday, as a severe weather outbreak is possible. A powerful upper-level jet stream bearing winds of more than 170 mph (see Figure 1) is slamming into the West Coast this morning and will carve out a sharp trough over the Southern Plains on Saturday. Very warm air is already in place--record or near-record highs in the upper 70s and low 80s are expected on Frida...

Even more than one might expect, the 2016 Atlantic hurricane season is shaping up with both high- and low-end possibilities, based on preliminary thoughts released Thursday by a team at Colorado State University. The CSU project, founded by Dr. William Gray with Dr. Phil Klotzbach now serving as lead author, has issued seasonal outlooks since 1984 for the anticipated amount of hurricane activity in the Atlantic basin. In 1993 the group began issuing outlooks each De...

Meteorological autumn (September – November) was the warmest in 121 years of recordkeeping for the 48 contiguous U.S. states, according to NOAA’s national wrapup of November and fall conditions released Wednesday morning. The national average of 56.8°F was a full 3.3°F above the 20th-century average and 0.2°F above the previous record of 56.6°F (Sep-Nov 1963). Only one state (Florida) had its warmest autumn on record, but the nation as a whole still came out...

Conditions in far southeast India are slowly improving after five weeks of frequent torrential rain that has led to more than 250 deaths. A region of low pressure positioned near Sri Lanka during much of the period channeled moisture from the Bay of Bengal and the record-warm eastern Indian Ocean toward the region. Much of the suffering has been in Chennai, an urban area of more than 9 million people that ranks as the largest in South India and among the world’s 4...

Amid all the genuinely awful news making the rounds in recent days, here is one bright spot: the year 2015 may end up with the lowest number of U.S. tornado fatalities in at least 141 years. As of December 2, preliminary numbers from the NOAA Storm Prediction Center show only 10 tornado-related deaths nationwide. If this number holds through the end of the year, it will beat the 12 deaths reported in 1910 to become the lowest annual total on record. NOAA/SPC keeps t...