English Script Request

Just when you think you've seen everything, check out these images. This looks like something you might expect to see on Mars or Venus. Brett Martin snapped these photos near Onslow, Australia. This is a haboob, a massive swirling storm of dusk and sand and grit. Think of it as a blizzard of dirt being swept along at about forty miles an hour, zero visability, symptomatic of the record heat gripping Australia and Tasmania. It has been a very wild start to the new year down under. Last year was plenty warm from Sydney, Melbourne all the way to Perth. Temperatures trending warmer than average, but the last ten, eleven days, off the scale heat. What's impressive is the extent of the heat, the duration and the intensity, and some of these temperatures literally take your breath away, as hot as 115 to 120 degrees in the outback of Australia. And again, at one point the meteorology department in Australia had to add new colours to their weather maps because it hasn't been this hot before, at least not in recorded history. Tim Holmes lives in Tasmania, Hobart, those are his five Grandkids, there's his wife. They had fire tornados sweeping across the landscape, engulfing their home, they literally took the Grandkids and hid underneath this jetty in the water for two and a half hours. As this wall of flames and smoke, this inferno, passed directly over their home. At one point it was hard to breathe, very little oxygen, everybody made it through OK, no injuries, but talk about the scare of a life-time, a tale of unbelievable survival down under. Epic heat forecast to continue based on the GFS guidance Australia, central parts of Africa and much of Argentina and Brazil. Meanwhile, forty below, Yakutsk, Siberia, coldest city on earth and it looks like the northern tier of the US, the next two weeks probably the coldest of winter which sounds about right. We will keep you posted, non-stop, right here.