In order for strong to severe storms to develop, the right conditions have to be present within the atmosphere. One of those is CAPE, or Convective Available Potential Energy.
The Weather Channel on MSN

Weather words: Fire front

The leading edge of a wildfire where flames actively spread and the landscape changes in real time.
Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Just as the word “doldrums” indicates a state of inactivity or stagnant, the summer months can experience this as well. The ...
A selenelion is a rare event that happens when you can see both a lunar eclipse and the sun in the sky at the same time.
The Weather Channel on MSN

Weather words: Desiccation cracks

Patterns of fractures in drying soil or mud, revealing where the ground has shrunk and changed.
Radar beams quite literally move at the speed of light, and when they bounce off an object in the sky and return to the radar site to be collected and analyzed, we called that an “echo.” For weather ...
Mammatus clouds are some of the most visually striking and unusual cloud formations in the sky. They appear as rounded, pouchlike lobes that hang down from the base of a cloud, usually under ...
When our weather team says the air is going to bite… sometimes they mean that quite literally. Meteorologist Derek Witt explains in this Weather Word of the Week. When describing how much snow has ...