Severe Tropical Cyclone Maila has been recorded as the strongest cyclone in the Solomon Sea, with peak sustained winds of 115mph and gusts reaching 160mph, causing extensive damage across the Solomon Islands.
"These improvements empower communities to prepare earlier and more effectively for dangerous hazards from tropical storms and hurricanes," said Michael Brennan, director of NOAA's National Hurricane Center.
Intensely cold air is scouring the central and eastern U.S. again and will send temperatures plummeting all the way to the tip of Florida. Along with this new Arctic incursion, a major bomb cyclone storm is strengthening off the coast of the Carolinas, potentially bringing rare blizzard conditions to the region. Some areas haven't seen this amount of accumulating snow in over 30 years, wrote the National Weather Service's office in Wilmington, N.C., on Facebook.
While cold-stunned iguanas fall from trees in Florida and videos circulate of frozen "exploding" trees in the Northeast, Southern California is working up a sweat. A midwinter heat wave has descended on much of the state and is expected to spike temperatures as much as 20 degrees above normal in the coming week. The summer-like heat is thanks to a ridge of high pressure lingering high in the atmosphere that extends through the San Francisco Bay Area and into the Pacific Northwest.
Spain and Portugal have endured another storm over the weekend, just days after the deadly flooding and major damage caused by Storm Kristin and Storm Leonardo last week. Storm Marta passed over the Iberian peninsula on Saturday bringing fresh torrential rain, killing two people. Storm Kristin killed at least five people when it swept through Portugal last week with Storm Leonardo claiming another victim last Wednesday.
This is a very serious set of weather conditions, said Emergency Management Commissioner Tim Wiebusch on Sunday. We haven't seen heatwave conditions like this in Victoria for almost 20 years. It was 2009, ahead of the [Black Saturday] bushfires where we saw those prevailing conditions.