The combination of tropical moisture and an offshore storm will result in an uptick in thunderstorms across portions of California on Wednesday and Thursday, weather experts are warning.

With most of the storms will contain little or no rain and could lead to a surge in wildfires, AccuWeather meteorologists warn.

The National Weather Service confirmed that a tornado touched down in a California field as thunderstorms swept through the central part of the state.

Cellphone video posted online shows the towering vortex spinning Saturday near Davis.

On a tower in the Brazilian rainforest, a sentinel scans the horizon for the first signs of fire.

Only these eyes aren’t human. They don’t blink or take breaks, and guided by artificial intelligence they can tell the difference between a dust cloud, an insect swarm and a plume of smoke that demands quick attention. In Brazil, the devices help keep mining giant Vale SA working, and protect trees for pulp and paper producer Suzano SA.

(TNS) — California will get shorter bursts of more intense rainfall as the climate warms, a new study by researchers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography suggests.

The study, “Precipitation regime change in Western North America: The role of Atmospheric Rivers,” was published Tuesday in the journal Nature Scientific Reports. It projects that California will face greater extremes of wet and dry seasons, with rainy periods dominated by atmospheric rivers — powerful plumes of airborne moisture that drench the West Coast.

A rare hailstorm hit normally sunny Southern California on Wednesday, as residents flocked to social media to post pictures of driveways, lawns and roofs blanketed in white nickel-size ice chunks.

The National Weather Service reported 1.57 inches of rain was recorded for the day at the Compton Creek rain gauge, while intense pockets of thunderstorms peppered the Southland. Freeways and roads were clogged even more than usual during rush hour, as Interstate 710 and State Route 91 were closed after several feet of water flooded lanes.

In the year that President Donald Trump pulled out of the Paris accord and downplayed global warming as a security threat, the U.S. received a harsh reminder of the perils of the rise in the planet’s temperature: a destructive rash of hurricanes, fires and floods.

The country recorded 15 weather events costing $1 billion or more each through early October, one short of the record 16 in 2011, according to the federal government’s National Centers for Environmental Information in Asheville, North Carolina. And the tally doesn’t include the recent wildfires in southern California.

In many cases, weather broke records. In others, it was just downright odd, like the February warm spell that sent temperatures to a record 72 Fahrenheit (22 Celsius) in Burlington, Vermont, and spawned a tornado in Massachusetts.