PPTV | Pikachu Power Television

Churning about 150 miles off the eastern coast of Florida, Tropical Storm Bret will pose little threat to the U.S. mainland this week as it is expected to remain well offshore.

The season’s second named storm, upgraded from a tropical depression late on Sunday evening, is meandering around the northern Bahamas this morning.

Grand Bahama, including the city of Freeport and Great Abaco, will experience bands of heavy rain today, along with wind gusts that could approach tropical storm force (39 mph or greater).

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Magnificent Moonbows in View This Weekend

Lucky visitors heading to Yosemite National Park this weekend will get a special treat if they stay up late enough. Conditions will be perfect for moonbows to make an appearance around the park’s waterfalls.

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In Texas, cattle are dying due to the drought-like conditions. The hitch is, they’re not dying of thirst. In fact, it’s quite the opposite.

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underpaidgenius:

The Drought Of 2011 just keeps getting worse:

Kim Severson and Kirk Johnson via

The pain has spread across 14 states, from Florida, where severe water restrictions are in place, to Arizona, where ranchers could be forced to sell off entire herds of cattle because they simply cannot feed them.

In Texas, where the drought is the worst, virtually no part of the state has been untouched. City dwellers and ranchers have been tormented by excessive heat and high winds. In the Southwest, wildfires are chewing through millions of acres.

Last month, the United States Department of Agriculture designated all 254 counties in Texas natural disaster areas, qualifying them for varying levels of federal relief. More than 30 percent of the state’s wheat fields might be lost, adding pressure to a crop in short supply globally.

Even if weather patterns shift and relief-giving rain comes, losses will surely head past $3 billion in Texas alone, state agricultural officials said.

Most troubling is that the drought, which could go down as one of the nation’s worst, has come on extra hot and extra early. It has its roots in 2010 and continued through the winter. The five months from this February to June, for example, were so dry that they shattered a Texas record set in 1917, said Don Conlee, the acting state climatologist.

Oklahoma has had only 28 percent of its normal summer rainfall, and the heat has blasted past 90 degrees for a month.

“We’ve had a two- or three-week start on what is likely to be a disastrous summer,” said Kevin Kloesel, director of the Oklahoma Climatological Survey.

The question, of course, becomes why. In a spring and summer in which weather news has been dominated by epic floods and tornadoes, it is hard to imagine that more than a quarter of the country is facing an equally daunting but very different kind of natural disaster.

And no end in sight.

A series of freak heavy snowfalls earlier this month left a swath of South American desert smothered in a deep mantle of snow.

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Tropical Storm 08W, to be known as Ma-on, will strengthen to a serious typhoon over the western Pacific Ocean by the end of the week.

Tuesday morning, July 12, 2001 EDT, the center of Tropical Storm 08W was located more than 700 miles northeast of Guam, tracking westward between 10 and 15 mph, according to the Joint Typhoon Warning Center (JTWC).

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The coyotes have been blamed for eating cats and other pets that stay out at night.

One woman said that a coyote snatched and killed her chihuahua while she was taking it on a walk in a park. She said that she found the partly-eaten body the next morning, according to the Associated Press (AP).

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Tiny Tornado Hits Living Room!

With the click of a light switch and the whoosh of a hair dryer, Bob Smerbeck can unleash a tornado on his living room anytime he likes. And he does, often.

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The center of the storm came ashore at Cabo Rojo, Mexico, or just to the south of Tampico, around 4:00 a.m. central time, packing estimated maximum sustained winds of 65 mph, with higher gusts.

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