The “Singing House” by Quintron is a roof-mounted synthesizer that is modulated by the weather. Sensors detect wind, rain, sunlight, moonlight, and lightning and transform the input into music.

Thanks to Deborah Yoon for the tip!

video by spellcasterlodge

Snow came early this year here in New York City. Here’s video of snow falling in Midtown Manhattan on October 29, 2011, the first snow of the year. Who knows, maybe we’ll have a White Halloween.

photo by Scott Beale

Photo­grapher Bertrand Kulik shot a spectacular photo of lightning striking behind the Eiffel Tower in Paris in July 2008.

via Daily Mail

photo by Betrand Kulik/Caters News Agency

Cinematographer/editor Jon Simonassi shot a beautiful video of lightning in Toronto during a recent thunderstorm.

“Irene NYC” by Buffalo Picture House

Two young filmmakers went out during Hurricane Irene to document their Manhattan neighborhood.

via Gawker, Anthony De Rosa & Brooklyn Mutt

Hurricane Irene, a powerful Category 3 hurricane, is threatening the East Coast of the United States. It is due to make landfall in North Carolina on Saturday, August 27 and travel up the coast through August 29.

The latest info on Hurricane Irene is being live updated on NY Times blog The Lede.

New York Times reporter Brian Stelter is currently in North Carolina reporting live from North Carolina via Twitter.

Hurricane Trackers

- The New York Times

- Google Crisis Response

- Weather Underground

- The Weather Channel

National Hurricane Info

- National Hurricane Center

- The Weather Channel Hurricane Central

- Ready.gov: Hurricanes

New York City Hurricane Info

- Hurricane Irene: What You Need to Know in New York (NY Times)

- Hurricane Irene: Questions and Answers (NY Times)

- For NYC hurricane updates, check out New York City Office of Emergency Services and follow @NYCMayorsOffice.

- Ready New York: Hurricanes and New York City (downloadable PDF)

- Mayor Bloomberg is shutting down NYC’s mass transit system on Saturday at noon in advance of the storm.

- Here is a map of the New York City Hurricane Evacuation Zones.

- A mandatory evacuation of Zone A has been ordered, residents should vacate by 5pm on Friday, August 26.

- The Wall Street Journal has created a list of NYC Hurricane Evacuation Centers on Foursquare.

- All five airports in the area will be closed to arriving flights as of 12pm on Saturday, August 27.

- Dan Patterson started a discussion on Google+ on what to pack in your Hurricane Go-Bag.

- Beatabeat has compiled a list of Hurricane apps for NYC.

NASA photos and video of the massive Hurricane Irene as seen from space.

“Tempest Milky Way” by Randy Halverson is a beautiful time-lapse video of stars in the sky shot during a storm.

Previously we featured Randy’s time-lapse video of The Milky Way Over the Plains of South Dakota.

London-based designer, Alex Woolley, has created a fabulous squirt gun umbrella he calls Encouraging Adults to Play in the Rain. While still in the concept stage, this bumbershoot really shoots…well, water anyway. Rainwater is cleverly harnessed down into the specially designed handle and then fills up the water pistol for rainy day fun!

via Oh Gizmo! and Fancy

To help deal with the massive heat wave in the US, Fake Science has created this chart to help you Find Your SPF.

via The Art of Bleeding

N SKY C is a site by Mike Bodge that generates an average color from a live webcam image of the New York City sky, updated every five minutes.

via Chris Glass

This week’s 5 day weather forecast includes some rain and a change of judgement on Saturday.

via Jesus Needs New PR & Blame It On The Voices

In 2009 Craig Allen shot an amazing photo of a lightning strike above the Seaholm Power Plant in Austin, TX.

New York City Is My Muse captured an amazing video showing The Empire State Building being struck by lightning three times in a row during last night’s epic thunderstorm.

via Gothamist

Keep your dog dry while walking them in the rain with The Dogbrella, available at Hammacher Schlemmer.

This inverted bumbershoot forms a waterproof cocoon around a small dog, enabling canine and master to maintain a walking regimen in inclement weather. The umbrella’s 29″ diameter canopy is made from 8-gauge clear polypropylene that sheds rain, sleet, and snow while allowing an unfettered view of your walking companion. Not only does the umbrella eliminate the excuse “it’s too wet for a walk” from a dog owner’s lexicon (to the delight of most canines and the amusement of most spouses), it prevents moisture from getting spread throughout the home, along with the unpleasant scent of a wet dog. The tip of the umbrella hooks to your pet’s leash to keep it from straying beyond its protective canopy.

via LikeCool

Massive parking lot snow piles, the byproduct of street clearing efforts, are a fixture of snowbound cities. In “Above the Sun,” a spot-on parody of the classic mountaineering epic by Chicago’s Coudal Partners, two brave climbers attempt to scale just such a snow pile

After the great Chicago Blizzard of 2011, thousands of pounds of snow were removed from city’s downtown streets. Loaded by bulldozers and heavy trucks, much of the snow was piled in the empty lot between our studio and the railroad tracks.

In a collaborative effort between Coudal Partners and The Explorers of the New World Society, an expedition was immediately formed. The goal; a bold assault aiming to place the very first men upon the summit of this peak.

One last post to cap our coverage of the great San Francisco snow controversy of 2011. It has been widely quoted that this was the first snow in San Francisco since 1976, but we have a few pieces of evidence that there has been tons, literally, of the cold white stuff in SF between now and then–some in the air and some on the streets.

Notably there was a very localized snow event in the middle of San Francisco in August of 2005. Two-hundred tons to be precise, enough to make Norwegians smile, covered a couple blocks of Fillmore Street to celebrate US Olympic skier Jonny Moseley‘s 30th birthday. He and his friends decided to produce a surreal summertime ski and snowboard jump event called ICER AIR in the midst of the tony Pacific Heights neighborhood.

It was controversial and sparked neighborhood outrage, but then-Mayor Gavin Newsom was willing and the event was approved. By all accounts, it was a blast, dude. Jumpers launched from one of those fake San Francisco trolleys, Frank Chu even showed up. But the SF street hassle was apparently more than the producers wanted to deal with again. The event was produced three more times in San Francisco, but after that year it was held in the AT&T Park baseball stadium.

Golden Gate Weather Services lists a total of 11 days with snow of .1 inches or more from 1856-1976. TheStormKing.com has a great article on the history of snow in San Francisco including the image above from 1882.

More modestly, this video shot near Golden Gate Park shows what certainly looks to me, and numerous on-camera bystanders, like snow back in 1999. I don’t think the fact that it seems to have been shot outside a bar in the middle of the day should at all take away from the visual evidence that it offers.

Whatever it was (and however much of it) that fell in 2011 was not recognized as snow by the official flake-counters at the National Weather Service. Though they did confirm that the city matched a record low temperature for the day.

If you feel this whole precipitation definition stuff is unjust and poorly handled, you can go from weather crank to certified weather witness with training by SKYWARN a volunteer program with nearly 290,000 trained severe weather spotters run by NWS.

Previously:

• Is It Snowing In San Francisco?
• Yes, It Did Snow In San Francisco… Sort Of
• The City of San Francisco Snowbound in 1952

This week the history and the possibility of snow in San Francisco has been a point of much discussion. Debate even, as we are still not sure if it snowed this weekend or not. But not much has been said about the time in 1952 that The City of San Francisco was snowbound for several days in Donner Pass. But it happened, as unlikely as that seems.

The City of San Francisco was the name of a passenger train line that ran between Chicago, Illinois and Oakland, California. You could take a ferry for the final leg across San Francisco Bay to the city proper. You know how there’s that song with the line “…on a train they call The City of New Orleans“? Same deal. Only TCoNO is still around, running to this day. TCoSF was shutdown by Amtrak back in 1972.

The historic 1952 incident is documented on on the newsreel above, by the Central Pacific Railroad Photographic History Museum website and much more nerdily by a special module in Microsoft Train Simulator (who knew they had a train simulator?!?). Here’s a great review and extended look at the game:

If you are still wondering if it snowed in San Francisco, you are not alone. Last night Michael Cuffe of Warholian shot the video above which would seem to be definitive proof that it did snow in San Francisco. And yet controversy rages on.

Reports surfaced late Friday on the main sites tracking this story isitsnowinginsanfrancisco.com & isitsnowinginsfyet.com that, yes, we had flake. Local TV station KTVU has video. And The New York Times covered it, too:

Predictions had called for the possibility of the first significant snowfall in San Francisco since February 1976, when all of an inch fell, according to the National Weather Service. And just before midnight, several high-lying city neighborhoods, including Twin Peaks, at some 900 feet, reported light snowfall.

But in the morning The San Francisco Chronicle (which is some kind of “paper”?) reported “Record cold weather but no snow day for S.F.” and MSNBC.com also dumped rain on the snow parade:

No snow was observed in downtown San Francisco and AccuWeather.com meteorologist Dave Samuhel said the dusting would not count toward official records that show the last measurable snowfall in the area 35 years ago.

Don’t tell that to the cranks & madmen (aka our friends) who frequent the short-word-burst service known as Twitter:

.

The Twitterature is all a-flurry with talk of potential snow in Frisco-town, for details follow the trending topic #snowsf where the likes of @Mike_FTW are fomenting a revolt against reality with tweets about blizzard conditions in the Bay Area that, while often very funny, are in no way true.

Finally the National Weather Service SHOUTED inconclusively in its typical unsentimental style:

AS OF 4:10 AM PST SATURDAY…SHOWERS AND EVEN A FEW THUNDERSTORMS CONTINUE OVER THE OCEAN [...] WE HAVE HAD SPOTTER REPORTS OF SNOW SHOWERS ABOVE 400 FEET IN SAN FRANCISCO…SNOW SHOWERS IN FELTON…A MIX OF RAIN AND SNOW IN CARMEL VALLEY…AND A MIX OF RAIN AND SNOW AT THE FORECAST OFFICE IN MONTEREY.

The bottom line? Even if “technically” we didn’t rock Mohs Snowness Scale, some frozen white stuff appeared, but not that much. None of it stuck. Nobody sledded. Nothing to ski here, folks, just keep moving.

With forecasts predicting the first possible snow in San Francisco this weekend since 1976, websites have cropped up to keep us abreast of the Flurry of the Century:

- isitsnowinginsanfrancisco.com

- isitsnowinginsfyet.com

For those of you unfamiliar with San Francisco weather, snow is an extremely rare occurrence. The Poop, a San Francisco Chronicle blog, lists all the notable snowfalls mentioned in the newspaper’s archives dating back to 1882. There are 5. Here’s 1882:

UPDATE: Yes, It Did Snow In San Francisco… Sort Of

photo from the Chronicle archives/No photo credit listed

Have A Productive Snow Day on Incidental Comics

Photo of cars abandoned in the snow on the northbound side of Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive during the recent blizzard.

via Chicago Tribune | BuzzFeed

photo by E. Jason Wambsgans

Walked by some beautiful snow covered trees today on 40th Street in Manhattan.

photo by Scott Beale

Some big fluffy snow has been falling in New York City this week.

Samantha gives a demonstration of boiling water evaporating as it is thrown into the air during -30C weather in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Canada.

via Viral Viral Videos

Boing Boing posted an awesome gallery of Snow Day Photos, including a wonderful photo by maxpower33 of a snowman on the tarmac in front of a JetBlue plane.

photo by maxpower33