The Daily Croissant

"A record-breaking snowstorm struck Colorado in early February 2012, closing an interstate highway, grounding flights, and dropping more than a foot of snow on the Denver area. After moving out of northeastern Colorado, the storm left heavy snow across Nebraska. 

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this natural-color image on February 5, after skies had largely cleared over the region. Snow and mountain peaks create a mottled appearance in western Colorado. Elsewhere, the snow cover forms a wide, uneven track over Wyoming, Kansas, and Nebraska.

This snowfall did not break all-time records in Colorado, but it did break records for the month of February. The storm deposited 15.9 inches (40.4 centimeters) in Denver and 22.7 inches (57.7 centimeters) in Boulder. The National Weather Service also reported up to 18 inches (46 centimeters) of snow west of Omaha, Nebraska.

NWS meteorologists explained that northeastern Colorado generally experiences storms of this magnitude in March or April. This February storm showed some of the same characteristics of powerful spring storms, as a weather front from the Pacific Northwest converged with moisture from the Gulf of Mexico."

by Debi Bratrsovsky  

"When I first spotted this storm, 17 mi (27 km) north of Fort Morgan, Colorado, it appeared to be a mesacyclone. However, by the time I gathered my photography equipment and drove toward it, I could tell that it had changed quite a bit and was no longer so threatening. Nonetheless, the way the waning sunlight interacted with the fast moving storm clouds was breathtaking; indigo, ink and violet clouds swirling above a red-rimmed horizon. Note the rain shaft in the distance. Photo taken just before sunset on June 20, 2011."

by Robert Arn  

"The Pawnee National Grasslands in Colorado is an exceptional place both to observe nature and to stargaze. Observers have a nearly unobstructed view of the horizon. During the summer months, lightning can be seen miles away, and the night sky is generally free of annoying light pollution.

While waiting for skies to darken at a star party near Keota, Colorado last month, I directed my scope and camera toward a summer thunderstorm plowing across the plains. Its accompanying lightning; especially the cloud-to-ground lightning was quite dramatic. As shown above in a time lapse photo, a dozen or more strokes were recorded in less than half a minute. Each bolt typically generates 100,000,000 volts of electricity, and the more energetic strikes can reach temperatures of 54,000 degrees F (30,000 C). Before too long, the storm moved off, and I was able to turn my attention to the clearing and darkening sky."

by Tom Semadeni

"The photo above showing the effects of an intense wind storm during the passage of a very deep extratropical cyclone was taken at Red Rock Point Lighthouse in Killarney, Ontario. Red Rock Point marks the eastern entrance to Killarney, which is on the northern shore of Georgian Bay. Under a cloudless, late-October sky, winds were blasting out of the southwest, gusting to 54 mph (87 km/h), and spray from Georgian Bay was drenching the headland. The wind streams are clearly visible in the spray -- over the boulders. Note the white caps in the bay. Walking on the rocks in these strong winds was quite challenging. As the Sun was directly behind us when we snapped this picture, water droplets in the spray formed a delightful double rainbow."

These false-color images from NASA's Cassini spacecraft chronicle a day in the life of a huge storm that developed from a small spot that appeared 12 weeks earlier in Saturn's northern mid-latitudes.

This storm is the largest and most intense observed on Saturn by NASA's Voyager or Cassini spacecraft. The storm is still active. As seen in these and other Cassini images, the storm encircles the planet - whose circumference at these latitudes is 186,000 miles (300,000 kilometers). From north to south, it covers a distance of about 9,000 miles (15,000 kilometers), which is one-third of the way around the Earth. It encompasses an area of 1.5 billion square miles (4 billion square kilometers), or eight times the surface area of Earth. This storm is about 500 times the area of the biggest of the southern hemisphere storms observed by Cassini.

by Tammy Plotner on July 7, 2011

"It’s five hundred times bigger than any anything like it observed by the Cassini Mission in the last two years. It’s encompassing approximately 2 billion square miles (4 billion square kilometers) of Saturn’s surface. It’s releasing lightning bolts at a rate of ten per second and it’s happening ten times more frequently than other storms monitored since 2004. It’s so intense that’s it’s even visible in larger amateur telescopes. Just what is it? A Saturn Super Storm…"

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft was listening to the sounds of the storm, too. Much like our terrestrial lightning causes a static effect on an AM radio, Saturn creates a phenomena known as Saturn electrostatic discharges. Check out this audio file of the action!