The most amazing atmospheric event you have ever witnessed?

[David Wolfson]

As a very young child hand-in-hand with my parents, picking our way around debris and downed wires in the eye of hurricane Carol south of Boston. Then returning to the house and watching whole trees succumbing to the backside eyewall. We were on a west-facing hillside, so we could all watch the show out the east picture window without risking a faceful of glass.

 

[Terry Tyler]

when i saw this thread title, the first thing that came to mind was this severe warned MCS that come through one morning...i cant remember the day, but i know it was a pretty big event, and wasnt too long ago...

well, you know how lines are supposed to form 30 miles or so ahead of the front...well this one passed through about 530 in the morning, and after it done blew through or whatever, i come out side...it was cool, and still damp from the soaking rain, there was twigs and leaves out...and from that spot in the yard, you could look straight up and see the underside of the backsheared anvil...you could look straight east and still see lightning going on from the departing MCS...and you could look straight west and see a beautiful sunrise...

now what really tripped me out was, there was no clouds behind it (looking to the west) but there was this little fibrillated wave of clouds that just come creeping overhead, and then you could feel it...that little push of air, that i assume was the surface front...

at that point, i was at the intersection of a 1500+ mi squall line and a huge mass of air that was moving around the country...might not seem like much, but it was crazy...never will forget it!

 

[Wes Carter]

In October 1990 the ship I was on in the Navy put out to sea to ride out hurricane Lilly because they thought it might hit our homeport of Norfolk, VA. The waves and swells were so intense that we took several rolls that were about 45 degrees. The ship was not designed to take rolls that steep because we had steam propulsion and there was a lot of fear that the boilers would flame out then we would be dead in the water. We hit one swell so hard that I was thrown into the air and grabbed onto piping in the overhead to keep from falling back to the deck. I had to go to the bridge and all you could see was rain hitting the windows and occasionally it would let up enough to see the waves we were riding. Some of them had to be 60 feet tall or more. They were coming well over the focastle, which was 45-50 foot above the waterline in calm water.

 

[Matthew Fischer]

The most amazing atmospheric even i saw was in November i think it was in Chicago. I could actually go outside my house here in suburbs and look up and see the northern lights! That was pretty amazing! I froze my butt off it just watching and getting some pictures out by Aurora, IL.

 

[Chris Gullikson]

Mine would probably be driving up to the western edge of the Harper/Attica meso on 5-12-04 with a wedge on the ground to the southeast.

Also watching the first signs of impact marks on Jupiter from comet Shoemaker/Levy through my telescope.

 

[Adam Lucio]

Tough call.

I do remember viewing the Auroras from here in Chicago in 2004, It was incredible, I drove to the forest preserves and watched them for about an hour....on the way home I hit a deer.

The peak leonid meteor shower [ i wanna say around 2002 maybe] was quite a sight...and I couldnt take my eyes off comet Hale-Bopp as well.

As far as weather goes...my most recent tornado will be hard to beat...here in the Chicago burbs of all places.

 

[Eric Flescher]

yes New Deal

Yes Mike
It was the New Deal wall cloud . I forgot the name so thanks. I am not sure whether anyone else saw it or had as good a vantage point as we did. It was huge. The turbulence was phenomenal. I still watch the video and show my students to this day.

See the shot on my avatar pic of the wallcloud, beaver tail and
Many great shots that day. The sun at that time was now going down in the West. This one had the hailstorm coming from the right, the light blushing on to the clouds, the wall cloud on the left and the amazing beaver tail coming in from over the top diagonal going into the hailstorm or near the wallcloud

PS
* The Leonid meteor shower of 2000 or was it 2001 -there so many but unfortuntely most were very faint

* the 4 days that I was able to view Comet McNaught over Kansas Jan 2007 before it went even better as it headed into the Southern Hemisphere and unfurled that remarkably long graceful tail. The last few seconds on the 4th day, I snapped the comet at -1 with its beautiful gold white color. Hale- Bopp was something else too but McNaught was really special too.

* in the late 70's or was it 1980, got up one night about 2am for some reason in Ann Arbor, Michigan and the sky was full of red and green brilliant aurora.I turned on the TV and heard the Pope had passed away. wowwwwwww

::

Was that the great New Deal wall cloud? I've heard stories of that thing!

 

[Tom Dulong]

Looking up through the eye of Hurricane Donna as it passed over my childhood home in Hingham, MA. Although I was only 5 years old, I still remember the strange light and calm - everything was bathed in a yellow-green hue. Probably my oldest memory but it still gives me chills.

 

[Chris White]

Widespread Aurora Borealis display that happened around Nov 11, 2004 (I might be off by a year, and I might have been off by a couple days but, it was deer hunting opener I think in 2004). But, I was in the Superior National Forest quite a ways from the North shore, no artificial lighting within miles, no city's of any significant size within 100 miles (we were WNW of Lutsen, MN, it was the closest town). We typically give up hunting prior to dark but, spent a while longer out this evening, we jumped in the SUV and began driving back to the lodge we were staying at and the sky opened up and it was absolutely a stunning storm. Many people saw a spectacular storm under the light pollution of the Metro Twin Cities, our storm under some of the darkest sky's of the nation was just jaw dropping stunning, we were speechless for about 10 minutes, we pulled over immediately and shut down the SUV to allow our eyes to adjust. I have never gone deer hunting without an SLR since. Since then I have seen one major storm on 9/11/2005 under dark sky's at an observatory, and a few others at observatories (your chases at seeing aurora's seem to go up when you spend night's out doing astronomy). Most recently I took some shots at superior national forest(3/27/08) of a very minor storm caused by solar winds from a coronal hole.

McNaught was also pretty cool to see at twilight, meteor showers are cool but, have not seen anything with high rates, the best I did was the Persieds of 2005 I believe where I stayed up all night on a workday.

 

[Jason Foster]

Hurricane Charley Hands down.

Hands down for me was Hurricane Charley. Seeing clouds only about 700 feet above you and moving about 160+/-mph (in the eyewall) is just unnatural....but fantastically amazing.

 

[Maggie Kahman]

1) My moment was when i was at the top of Pikes Peak. At the top of the mountain, I was standing at the edge and remember looking DOWN - no, they were a little lower then eye-level - and seeing little puffy cumulus clouds. I also remember how little air there was up there. I found it difficult to breathe.

2) My second moment was when i saw my first funnel cloud. I remember how long and skinny it got before it disipated. I pulled off the Highway on to a gravel road so i could get out and watch it. I could hear the tornado sirens going off in town. That day left me pretty satisfied.

 

[Jody Radzik]

My interest in severe weather was sparked in the late 60s in central New Jersey – Freehold to be exact – when a massive roll cloud that stretched from horizon-to-horizon rolled overhead as I waited for my mom in a grocery store parking lot. The diameter of the cloud was between 100 - 200 yards, at an altitude less than 1000 feet. One big, long, rolled-up cloud carpet slowly rolling itself from the NW to the SE in front of a severe storm's outflow.

 

[AlDanks]

(2) 1979 incoming bow echo storm which came into Ann Arbor , MI area that made the sky turn an amazing lime-green color before it tore up the power stations etc

aka "The Green Storm"

(1) I remember the mammatus overhead as I drove to work and then the storm hit. The air was so full of rain that it was green. It was like looking into the bottom of a swimming pool.

(2) Driving Going To the Sun Road in Glacier National Park and driving up into a thunderstorm. As we approached the storm the wind was driving the rain into the mountain where it then proceeded to blast up along the side of the road. Raining up! We crossed the continental divide in the thunderstorm.

(3) My first tornado.

(4) The leading edge of a shelf cloud that became separated from the thunderstorm as the storm raced north. Looked like a curved lace curtain hanging over a rich green valley.

(5) Greater than baseball size hail in Hutchinson, KS.

 

[Greg McLaughlin]

The most memorable weather phenomena experience I witnessed was in October 1996 (don't remember exact date) here in Tulsa. We had a classic "Blue Norther" cold front sweep through the state one Friday afternoon. I was playing football with some friends after school (I was a freshman that year) when the front plowed trhough Tulsa shortly after 4pm.

We had reached a balmy 86 degrees for a high, and the temperature dropped to near 60 by 5pm. There were tornado warnings just east of Tulsa (tornado was reported near Okay, OK) while snow was falling in Stillwater! The temperature bottomed out in the low 20s that night with 2" of snow on the ground the next morning.

Another event worth noting is a shallow arctic front which stalled across Tulsa county (Jan 01?). The front was stationary with Temps in the mid sixties imediately south of the front dropping into the mid 30s north of the front. I remember driving about one mile and watching the thermostat in the car drop from 64 to 37.....IN ONE MILE!

Out of all the storms and tornadoes I have chased, those two events have amazed me the most.

 

[Joe Zemek]

I have been most amazed by:

1) my first supercell (Verdigre-Royal-Norfolk, June 3 '00)

2) my first tornadoes (Atkinson-O'Neill June 9 '03)

3) a brilliant blue-white meteor seen from Denver's City Park, 199...4? 5?

4) a MILES-long anvil CG, seen from my house at night crossing the city of Phoenix a few monsoons ago. The only storm around was 20 miles away over Sun City, and this bolt crossed the entire northern sky going well to my east, with a handful of steps down to the ground. For that millisecond it hung over the city like a whitehot iron gate. The eastern end of the bolt was into Scottsdale or beyond. And though it was well north of me, it was LOUD, not surprising given the volume of zapped air.

The aurorae borealis are #1 on my atmospheric bucket list.

I just hope that I have yet to see the most amazing atmospheric thing I will ever see.