Weather Photographer of the Year 2020 winners show ice, lightning and rainbows

The winners are in for this year's annual Weather Photographer of the Year competition, hosted by the Royal Meteorological Society in association with AccuWeather.  

The top-ranking image, taken by Rudolf Sulgan, shows a crowd of people on New York's Brooklyn Bridge during a 2018 blizzard. Judges said it made them feel like they were there standing in the cold with the pictured subjects.

This image, of a leaf frozen in ice in Russia, won the Young Photographer of the Year award for Kolesnik Stephanie Sergeevna, who's just 17.

This eerie image of turquoise ice pushed up by melting and refreezing was selected as the public's favorite image. Alexey Trofimov took the photo on Lake Baikal in Siberia.

Mysterious mist floats over Long Coc Tea Hill in Vietnam in this dreamy image taken by Vietnamese photographer Vu Trung Huan. It was named first runner-up in the competition.

Emma Rose Karsten was 17 when she took this photo from the parking lot of her school, Lafayette High School in Wildwood, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis. It depicts a huge cloud that Karsten originally thought was an enormous wall of water. It won her the runner-up award in the Young Photographer of the Year competition.

In this 360-degree panorama by Alessandro Cantarelli, the moon illuminates Italy's Tre Cime di Lavaredo (Three Peaks of Lavaredo), as well as the fog and cloud that surrounds the cross on top of Mount Paterno. A magnified shadow of the photographer and the cross is also cast onto the fog below, an optical phenomenon called a Brocken Spectre.

In Perthshire, Scotland, Richard Fox captured this image of a "fogbow," an optical phenomenon similar to a rainbow.

Richard Fox took this image of an amazing set of rainbows in Stirling, Scotland, while on vacation with his wife. 

This eerie image, taken by Mikhail Kapychka, shows a lunar halo in the Belarus night forest sky.

Arizona resident Lori Grace Bailey snapped her "dream shot" in El Paso, Texas, as a thunderstorm cell moved north from Mexico over the desert city landscape.

A drone helped Yuriy Stolypin take this photo of the tallest skyscraper in Europe, the 87-story Lakhta Center in Saint Petersburg, Russia, as it was shrouded in morning fog. 

A lone woman walks in the rain at London's Waterloo Station in this photo by Adrian Campfield.

Croatian photographer Šime Barešić woke from a sudden sleep and dashed off to photograph the sunset, but halfway there, stopped to snap this image of a powerful supercell storm in the Vransko Lake area of Croatia.

Winters in Yellowstone National Park can get downright chilly. American photographer Laura Heidien says the temperature was near zero Fahrenheit (-17 Celsius) when this snow-covered bison ambled by.

"Mammatus" clouds get their name because they resemble cow udders. German photographer Boris Jordan captured this spectacular image of colorful, low-hanging mammatus clouds near Leipzig, Germany.

Croatian photographer Ivica Brlić took this photo of a snowy field as the sun sinks below the horizon in Davor, Croatia.

The beautiful rock formation known as El Chaltén in Argentina is shown under a  spectacular and brilliant lenticular cloud. The image was taken by Francisco Javier Negroni Rodriguez of Santiago, Chile.

For nearly a year, Welsh photographer Joann Randles has been capturing images of the semi-feral ponies of the Gower, in Swansea, Wales.  After a hailstorm, a rainbow formed, but this pony seems oblivious.

British photographer Andrew McCaren drove 2.5 hours from his home in Leeds to Cumbria, where he captured water pouring down the spillway of Wet Sleddale dam.

On the morning after a bitterly cold night in December, American photographer Preston Stoll left Steamboat Springs, Colorado, looking to photograph winter weather. This image, taken in Medicine Bow-Routt National Forest, shows a fog bank looming behind frosted trees.

While on a Great Plains storm chasing adventure in rural Colorado, American photographer Tori Jane Ostberg snapped this image of an EF2 tornado tearing through a rural Colorado field after destroying a home. 

Every year, the Iranian people hold a mourning ceremony in the historic city of Noshabad, Isfahan. As the 2019 event was about to begin, Iranian photographer Hadi Dehghanpour caught this image of a small tornado that came toward the ceremony site and tore down the tents and benches.

Dramatic Dyrholaey Cape in Iceland is the setting for this photo taken by Russian photographer Mikhail Shcheglov, just before a strong thunderstorm with hail roared in.

A shelf cloud drapes itself across Umag in Croatia, associated with thunderstorms moving over the area. The shelf cloud is a low-level, horizontal, wedge-shaped cloud that occurs along the leading gust front in an intense thunderstorm. Croatian photographer Maja Kraljik captured this monstrous one after waiting two hours, winning the second runner-up award.

During Bangladesh's drought season, people often use dried fields as shortcuts to travel between villages. Bangladeshi photographer Abdul Momin took his image of the cracked earth in Chittagong, Bangladesh.

This was one of the top two largest haboobs (dust storms) ever recorded in the state of Arizona. When American photographer Tina Wright took this image, the 2018 storm was fully mature, towering over a mile high with winds in excess of 80 mph. The setting sun gave the dust wall its deep pink hue.

What looks like a dreamy river of clouds dominates this photograph, taken by Italian photographer Sabrina Garofoli in Lombardy, Italy. With high pressure and the absence of wind, thick layers of fog thicken and flow along the Adda River, giving rise to a muffled landscape.