Most bizarre/strange weather event you've ever seen

[John MacKay]

Not extremely bizarre events, but events nevertheless.

The ice storm on Jan. 4th of this year (I remember that because power went off during an important game that night) around the Wichita area (I forget how widespread it was). It was around 30-32F all day and into the night as everything above ground turned to ice. I remember a heavy downpour that lasted a few hours into the evening. As we ventured out onto the road, flash flooding was occurring in many areas, one major street in Douglass reduced to one lane because of the flooding. Almost every county to our south and east of us in KS was under flood warnings that lasted past the point when all the roads would turn into ice as the cold front dipped temperatures to lower than 20F. That event left many without power for 7-10 days and people in my town were looking for generators in Ponca City, 50 miles away. I think more than 80,000 households didn't have power that night.

The other one was the SPC high risk day of May 8, 2003. We started chasing a storm that showed rotation south and east of Manhattan. I went south to I-70 and my chase partner and I noted a wall cloud off to our north. Then, the only severe thunderstorm warning to come across my weather radio that night. As the warning is issued, they say 65-mph winds 1 mile west of Alma as we got to the 1 mile sign for the Alma exit (GREAT!). We knew it was the southern part of the storm (which developed out of nowhere), and I was scared, as every storm that day quickly went tornado warned.

Not even one minute later this huge downburst gushing out to the south of us started rocking the car vigorously (the grass in the field to our south was moving north only, that was a good sign in retrospect), pelting the windows with penny-sized hail (sounded and looked like neither the windows nor the car would survive). I would estimate the winds at least 70 mph, maybe as high as 80 mph at times. After that happened, I swore off chasing after the event until I looked on radar later and saw that the development on the south end extended for 10 miles, and it never resembled a hook echo. It's still the major reason I try to use interstate only when necessary and I avoid any hail larger than dime size.

 

[mark humpage]

Ac Cs with trailing virga. Taken at Leicestershire, UK on 16 Sept 2003. This amazing phenomena occurred on the back of ex hurricane Fabian which skirted the British Isles and provided the mid-level instability that you see in the photo. The trailing virga made for some spectacular sightings. Almost extra-terrestrial or jelly fish looking. A very rare catch indeed.

Mark

[Broken External Image]:http://www.mhweather.co.uk/mhwphp/images/UKStorms/photos/Tues 160903 Ac Cs 950pix.jpg

 

[Robert Edmonds]

This happened a few years ago. I grew up in Nederland, CO. I had 6.5ft of snow. At my mothers house near Rollinsville they had 7.5ft to 8ft of snow. You had to swim through it to get any where. I never thought it could snow that much in a single snow fall. I had heard rumors that it was possible, but when the forecasters said it could be that big I was expecting maybe a foot or two at the most. I was sure wrong!

 

[Mike Kay]

Back in July 1994, I witnessed what I believe was the most unusual lightning bolt I ever saw. I was staying at my stepmother's parent's place in Birch Hills, Saskatchewan, a small farming community some 1.5 hours northeast of Saskatoon. One night, there was an incredibly long and huge thunderstorm and CGs were lighting up really close to the town, no more than 2-4 km away (1.3-2.5 miles). One CG stood out from the rest, though.

First, it appeared as a really bright string of beads, then less than a second later, it turned into a solid bolt. That CG was not only unusually bright - it was very close, too. Only less than 2 seconds later, I was hit by the loudest thunder I had ever heard. I swear windows must have rattled quite a bit. Air raid sirens blew later on, but I was told that this was to alert volunteer firefighters, not because of a tornado. Sure enough, there was no tornado, but a barn less than 1 km away from the town was hit by a CG and caught fire on that night. There was remarkably little rain and no hail in the town on that night, either, although quite a bit of both fell some distance away.

Also back in 1999, I saw what looked like a an outrageuosly skinny Cu tower over Edmonton that had LP-ish characterisitcs. The whole tower was really tall, but it could not have been more than 1000 feet wide, and had a really smooth, sculpted bell base with a really fat and stubby "beaver tail" sticking out of it to the south. I couldn't really tell if it was rotating or not. This was on an evening while some severe thunderstorms were nearby to the west of the city.

Last year in July, I've seen lightning shoot out of an orphan anvil complete with virga, while watching another cluster of multicell storms from the river valley in Edmonton.

On that same month, I saw a sky during a thunderstorm which was so completely green, it was like the whole city was under a green sea. I had never seen anything like it before. I had seen green skies during severe thunderstorms, but usually only with a greenish tinge or covering a small portion of the clouds. This was a few days after the great storm on July 11, 2004, when hail up to the size of baseballs fell and so much rain flooded major roads and forced an evacuation of West Edmonton Mall because of massive roof leakage.

On December, 2004 about a week before Christmas in Edmonton, I remember having seen an actual thunderstorm with rain and sleet/small hail combination. I heard a lot of thunder, but no snow fell, because it was too mild. There was very little snow on the ground at the time as well. This is only the second time in my life I have ever seen a thunderstorm between October and April. (first time was when I was about 7 and was visiting relatives in Sydney, Australia at the time)

 

[Andrew Khan]

Hmm, the time would of have to been when I went outside, to watchthe sky, since we had some bad weather coming, and I'm a spotter in my area, I say a tail, cloud by itself that was quite low lying about two miles away from me, which then turned into what looked like a wall cloud with scud beneath it, it had a rain curtain and was HP.

 

[David Draun]

I don't know when this happened, as I was really young, but it was a weird one. This bank of clouds rolled in from the south one evening, and they had a lot of in-cloud lightning. They passed directly over my area, not one drop of rain fell. There also was no thunder.

I remember the only time I saw an LP supercell. This was an evening in the fall of 1988, as the remnants of what was Hurricane Gilbert were exiting the area. It had a lot of CG lightning, and it dropped quarter-sized hail. The precip didn't last long, but it had a nice wall cloud, illuminated red by the setting sun behind it. I don't remember if it was rotating or not. but as it passed over, the winds went calm. Later that night,the final wave of severe storms moved through, finally ending a week of severe weather and heavy rain for the Chicago area, caused by those remnants.