Strangest weather phenomena you've seen?

[Bacco]

Golf ball sized hail /ice balls raining down on a hot mid summer July day

Came to say this

 

[pookiyama]

Driving through Santa Rosa during the bay area fires last year. It looked exactly like the beginning of the book of Eli. Everything is a greyish, greenish, yellow. With red seeping in because something was on fire everywhere you looked for hours.

We couldnt go outside for a week, national advisory warning.

 

[rj144]

I don't know. He said that it was sunny, but he could literally see the rain coming in.

To think of it, it was normal for him though.

Yeah, I've seen that many times. At least a few times a year.

 

[TSO]

In 96 there was a tropical storm off the coast of SD and we were having a blast surfing the massive swell it caused. Then it turned to shore and there were golfball sized hail, lightning, and water spouts happening before we could even get to shore. It was fucking nuts.

Damn autocorrect kept changing "golfball" to "football" that would.have been far worse.

 

[TSO]

In 96 there was a tropical storm off the coast of SD and we were having a blast surfing the massive swell it caused. Then it turned to shore and there were golfball sized hail, lightning, and water spouts happening before we could even get to shore. It was fucking nuts.

Damn autocorrect kept changing "golfball" to "football" that would.have been far worse.

Edit: There was a sharknado as well, they made several documentary films about it.

 

[Headkicktoleg]

Not exactly strange,but a tornado touched down almost on top of my car. It killed 4 people at the intersection I was at

 

[Andy Capp]

We had a red sun a few months back in England. Not something i've ever seen before.

Supposedly it was caused by the dust and air collected by hurricane Ophelia during it's travels which acted as a filter of some kind and altered the sun's colour.

High frequency light from the sun tends to get absorbed more easily than red which is reflected to your eye. It's exactly the same reason sunsets are red.

 

[Andy Capp]

Not exactly strange,but a tornado touched down almost on top of my car. It killed 4 people at the intersection I was at

That must have been pretty horrific.

 

[Sir Galahad]

Saw a huge waterspout on Lake Ponchartrain. @Cajun

 

[bref]

When I was living in Saskatchewan we had a tornado come out of nowhere. It was a really, really hot day and as evening fell I was chilling on my couch watching the clouds through the window and you could tell something nasty was coming just by the cloud movement. Then out of nowhere a wall of wind came in and threw half of the big ass oak tree in my front yard through my front picture window. I ran down to the basement and could just hear shit smashing upstairs and the cupboards banging open and closed. I was pretty sure I was going to die.

When I was living in Calgary a few years ago we had golf ball sized hail just roll in out of nowhere on a hot summer day. I ran outside to move my car into the garage and had the shit pelted out of me. Welts on my head/shoulders/arms. I got my car in the garage but it was too late, covered in small dents and had the texture of a golf ball.

Chinooks winds (warm winds off of the Rocky mountains) in Calgary are pretty cool too. It will go from being -30 C to +20 C (~-25F to +70F) in a couple of hours in the middle of winter.

 

[Seano]

I've seen hail like that before.

One time I was outside snowblowing the driveway after dark. It was still snowing some. Suddenly I saw a flash. I couldn't figure out what it was then I saw another. A little burst of electricity. I don't know what you call it when there is lightning in snow storm, probably just lightning, but it looks really weird. Scared the shit out of me, it was really close.

 

[Plissken]

I have a terrible memory with this sort of thing, neatest ones I remember clearly were clear demarcations between the end of a rain storm to clear sky with no rain right on my property. I mean there have also been crazy days that go between clear sky, rain, freezing rain, snow, hail, sleet, and lightning (the latter often happening at the same time as others) with strong winds, but that's just New England weather.

 

[blitzk]

not exactly weather related but it is a natural phenomenon called luminescence and it's basically a wave that is lit up by millions of microbes that capture and emit light and it looks something like this:

 

[HomerThompson]

I saw ball lightening once in Lawrence, KS during a pretty crazy storm. That was wild.

 

[Yunes]

A couple of years a go something like 15 tornadoes touched down in dfw in one afternoon. One hit a transfer yard and had 53 foot semi trailers spinning around a hundred feet in the air. No one was killed. I was on the 15th floor of the world trade center when the shit hit the fan.

 

[Drenalin]