The African mountain's white peak - made famous by writer Ernest Hemingway - is rapidly melting, researchers report.

Some 85 percent of the ice that made up the mountaintop glaciers in 1912 was gone by 2007, researchers led by paleoclimatologist Lonnie Thompson of Ohio State University report in Tuesday's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

And more than a quarter of the ice present in 2000 was gone by 2007.

If current conditions continue "the ice fields atop Kilimanjaro will not endure," the researchers said. Read more »

Maybe it's just Mother Nature getting in the Halloween spirit.

A new video making the rounds on the Internet shows a spooky looking cloud over Romania:

More specifically, a part of Mars that has been dogged by their version of dust devils. Read more »

The poll of 1,500 adults by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press found that only 57 percent believe there is strong scientific evidence the Earth has gotten hotter over the past few decades, and as a result, people are viewing the situation as less serious. That's down from 77 percent in 2006, and 71 percent in April 2008. Read more »

To answer the title question -- not much. I know, this is a "weather blog" but this was just too mind-blowing to ignore...

I was trawling around for blog topic ideas on one of my favorite sites, the Astronomy Picture of the Day and came across this that was posted earlier this month.

The question is: Are the squares marked "A" and "B" the same color?

Issaquah's Jeff Fogg, who is working down at Antarctica's McMurdo Station, continues to capture some of the amazing beauty of the South Pole area. 

Here are some nighttime photos of the moon over the barren snow-capped landscape. It'll be an increasingly rare sight as they head toward summer and 24 hour daylight. Starting Oct. 23, the sun will rise at 2:08 a.m. local time and then stay above the horizon all winter long, not setting until 1:25 a.m. on Feb. 20th. 

But daylight changes rapidly -- around the equinoxes, the days get longer/shorter by a whopping 14 minutes a day -- or roughly an hour every four days.  So much so that when they have their first sunset on Feb 20 it's only two months (April 24) until they are in 24 hour darkness, and the sun won't rise again on August 19th.

Chalk this up to perhaps "why did they think of that?" but a new concept phone gives you a pretty convincing display of what the weather will be.

According to the blog DesignCrave.com, "The Window Phone designed by Seunghan Song provides a sleek glass interface that changes to reflect the weather conditions outside."

The phone's face, which is transparent, changes to a look of rain or fog or clear, depending on what it's doing outside.

I think this device has already been invented. It's called a window :)  Actually, I'd say if you have any cell phone with weather capability, you can achieve a similar effect:

But that doesn't mean your shovels and skies will be collecting dust instead of snow -- it's still possible to get snow in El Nino years. Snow events tends to be weaker and less frequent, and mountain snowpacks on average run lower than normal in El Nino winters.

Here is the full article by Associated Press writer Seth Borenstein:

A friend forwarded me this YouTube video of an extraterrestrial-looking cloud that was apparently filmed over Moscow late last week.

We all know how beautiful this area is, but that doesn't mean Mother Nature can't provide a reminder from time to time.

First up are a series of photos from the brilliant sunsets of Wednesday night.

Gwennivere Miller, Darrington:

NASA will send a used-up spacecraft slamming into the moon's south pole to kick up a massive plume of lunar dirt and then scour it to see if there's any water or ice spraying up. The idea is to confirm the theory that water - a key resource if people are going to go back to the moon - is hidden below the barren moonscape. Read more »

In Thursday's weather blog, I highlighted some of the professional weather photographers on a national scale. How about giving some bigger props to the local folks?

Although this first one is a hybrid. Jason Hammel from www.alpinestateofmind.com was in the blog yesterday, but just posted some new photos of a hike on Mount Olympus, where he spent a week.  The top photo there is one of my new favorites, and this one below is a close second:

I admit -- I'm a sucker for awesome weather photography. I have probably 75 or 80 photos I keep in a folder to rotate through my computer desktop -- many submitted by local readers of our web site, but others I've found online.

If you're a fan of fantastic shots too, here is a small guide to some of the best weather photography I've found online.  Most of them have ways for you to buy prints if you're interested.

Some of the best of the best are taken by professional storm chasers, who are just crazy enough to actually try to get themselves in the paths of severe storms. It's a tireless job that requires incredible dedication and a willingness to drive hundreds of miles a day, get soaked to the bone and pelted with large hail, all the while hoping that tornado forms where it's supposed to, and not, say, 10 feet from your camera.

There are times these people will drive across three states (and remember the Midwestern states aren't exactly Rhode Island and Delaware), all for a storm that fizzles. But boy, the times they get in the right place at the right time, the results are simply breath-taking.

I get them all the time from viewers and I'm sure you do too -- e-mails filled with incredible photos with even more incredible tales behind them.

As you might suspect with randomly e-mailed items, a lot of these are either fake photos or perhaps real photos but wrong stories behind them.

With the help of stellar Internet urban legend sleuth snopes.com, I'll show you some of the most popular e-mailed photos, and whether you should believe what you read.

First up: Katrina tornadoes?

(Main photo above)

The e-mail comes with five or six ominously stunning photographs and says they were snapped in the Gulf Coast area as Hurricane Katrina approached in late August, 2005.

False! Snopes.com says these are actual photos, but not of anything related to Hurricane Katrina.

They are photos from various storms across the Midwest by storm chaser Mike Hollingshead. (Who, by the way, does stunning photography work. I'll be featuring him in a future blog.) Somehow, these got attributed as Katrina photographs. Snopes says these photos have also been erroneously attributed to Ontario tornados and tornadoes in Australia, among other things.

Approaching storm clouds from (insert hurricane name here)!

False! Snopes says this is another multi-use photo that seems to get reused everytime a hurricane approaches. It's believed this photo is actually a shelf cloud from a tropical storm off the Australian coast in 2003.

Only two hurricanes have formed in the Atlantic over the past three months, and neither hit the U.S. - a somewhat unusual lull.

"I'm glad that I didn't have to go out and get anything - yet," said Lissette Galiana, who was shopping at a Wal-Mart in suburban Miami on Friday, around what is usually the very peak of the Atlantic hurricane season. "There's always a chance." Read more »

I've been conversing a bit with Issaquah's Jeffery Fogg, who is stationed down at McMurdo Station in Antarctica for the next six months. He was the one that sent the stunning Nacreous Clouds we featured in the blog earlier this week.

It turns out, Antarctica is more than just pretty clouds and bone-chilling temperatures. They are doing important research!

I've been asking him what it's like down there, and we'll try to feature some of his experiences here on occasion so you can get a glimpse into life near the South Pole.

"This place is a beautiful wonderland," he said. "The scenery is spectacular!! Pictures just don't do it justice. You almost have to see it with your own eyes to appreciate it."

Of course, the first question you might ask: Just how cold is it? Here's a hint:

Sure, you can find weather forecasts anywhere these days -- even on your cell phone. But the old tried and true Farmer's Alamancs are still going strong!

Here is a article by AP Writer Russel Contreras:

BOSTON (AP) - Doris Smith Mills often comes across past editions of the "Old Farmer's Almanac" lying around her family's 110-year-old Westport, Mass., farm. She believes previous Smiths read it for entertainment and its yearly weather predictions to ready for New England's fickle climate changes.

Today, the 78-year-old has the 24-hour Weather Channel and various weather Web sites at her fingertips, and her farm has technology to handle all sorts of extreme weather. But she still reads the Dublin, N.H.-based almanac because it's been reliable for generations, she said.

"It helps us prepare," said Smith, whose family owns Noquochoke Orchards along the Westport River. "It's interesting. I like reading it."

Despite the accessibility of forecasts that rely more heavily on traditional science, the 218-year-old "Old Farmer's Almanac" and its longtime New England competitor, the Maine-based "Farmer's Almanac," still draw droves of fans. The books, which predict weather based on sunspots, planetary positions and meteorology, still are popular at farmers markets and bookstores. Each has a circulation of 3.5 million, and their Web sites are stacked with videos, blogs and podcasts.

If you haven't seen these photos yet in your e-mail inbox, you probably will sometime soon. It's the latest e-mail to make the rounds of awesome weather events, even if the e-mail itself isn't quite correct.

In the e-mail we received, it purports these are photos taken in the aftermath of a windstorm that went through Medicine Hat, Alberta "last week" although the e-mail has been making the rounds since at least early August.

Snopes.com, a go-to source on validity of such e-mail forwards, does not as yet have an entry for this. I haven't found any original news source for the photos to verify these were wind-blown in Medicine Hat, but the theory is sound. Out in the flatlands up there, they do get a lot of wind.