Sunday afternoon thunderstorms twirled-up a tiny funnel cloud in Pullman.  At around 3:39 p.m., Walmart shoppers stopped their carts in the parking lot to snap several pictures of the skinny, rope-like vortex.  It didn't last long, and didn't  touch the ground.  A funnel cloud was also reported by a trained National Weather Service spotter around 3:30 p.m., 5 miles north of Colton, also in Whitman County.   The chance of thunderstorms returns Monday aft

Last week's horrific, record-shattering tornado outbreak had many of us breathing a sigh of relief that we live so far away from "tornado alley".  That said, we do get our own brand of severe weather here in the Inland Northwest, and it's important that we know what to do when it happens.  This is "Severe Weather Awareness Week", and our local National Weather Service office has a series of special reports chock-full of

It's not snow.  It's not hail.  It's something in-between, and it's been falling all over the Inland Northwest this week.  It's GRAUPEL.   Most folks confuse graupel with hail or snow, but there is a difference.

The American Meteorological Society Glossarydefines graupel like this: Heavily rimed snow particles, often called snow pellets.  Hail, on the other hand, is defined like this: Precipitation in the form of balls or irregular lumps of ICE always produced by convective clouds, nearly always c