Later discovered it was a 50-mile swarm of bugs was hovering over Texas

So they were baffled when they spotted 'heavy rainclouds' on their radar

Anyone bemoaning wet weather forecasts this weekend should remember - it could be much worse.

After previously predicting clear, sunny skies, meteorologists in Oklahoma were baffled when they spotted fast-moving heavy rainclouds hovering northwest Texas.

But they soon realized that the cloud they were seeing was no weather formation - but a 50-mile wide swarm of grasshoppers.

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Meteorologists in Oklahoma thought the swarm (pictured on their radar) was a fast-moving band of raincolouds

Grasshoppers fly in a random pattern on their own but in an organised way when part of a swarm

'We didn't have any clouds yesterday to form anything like that,' Jonathan Kurtz, a meteorologist at the Norman Forecast Office told CNN.

'Our first indication was some kind of biological feature.'

After coming to the conclusion that the cloud was bugs, the weather service called the Copper Breaks State Park in Quanah, Texas, to confirm.

David Turner, park manager, said: 'We have grasshoppers and beetles around here but not anything more than usual.'

Visitors could see bugs flying around them, but the 'swarm' was practically invisible because it was around 2,500ft up in the sky.

Forecaster Mr Kurtz added: 'It doesn't take a whole lot of bugs to cause that on radar. It's not like biblical proportions.

'There was just enough out there that the radar picked it up.'

According to scientists, grasshoppers and locust swarm after entering a 'gregarious state', in which levels of the chemical serotonin increase.

Similar to locusts, swarming grasshoppers can wipe out entire crops in agricultural areas and devastating farming economies.

A swarm of locusts or grasshoppers is also very structured. A single grasshopper flying along follows its own random path, but when approached by a dense group of flying grasshoppers, it joins them and flies in an organised way as a member of the swarm.