Your first amazingly beautiful thing experienced in weather

StephenLevine

What was your first amazingly beautiful thing that you experienced in weather, and what was your reaction to it?

One evening when I was five, after being put to bed at 7:30 pm as per usual, I looked out my bedside window and saw a breath taking sky that was so beautiful that it both inspired and hurt.
A thunderhead covered 1/2 of the sky from horizon up, colored fiery pink, purple and violet; knifed by constant horizontal rivers of platinum lightning. This broke into crystal deep blue overhead.
The beauty was so tangeable yet far away that I wanted to merge with it, yet felt frustrated that window and space between us made this impossible.
 
When I was younger, I had just got out of school for the last day and was walking home when I looked up and a saw a huge black funnel cloud with a brilliant, white backdrop of clouds. I sprinted for like, 3 blocks to the house. :p
 
Now THAT would be an awesome poster!!!
This is the very first weather shot I've seen with this type of theme, and yes - it certainly combines beauty of both human and natural elements - and I believe this photo could net you quite alot of money.
I believe that blending sensuality and weather in this way could be a huge untapped market, and would probably bring storm watching/chasing out of the closet with the same kind of force that the movie Twister first did in 1996.
 
Re: Your first amazingly beautiful thing experienced in weat

What was your first amazingly beautiful thing that you experienced in weather, and what was your reaction to it?
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http://www.storm-site.com/stmglry/stm02/0602/0602.html

The June 2002 storm that made me fall in love with storm/lightning photography. Caught my first CG, unintentionally, and couldn't believe my eyes. Now I'm addicted, and everyone thinks I'm crazy. :wink:
 
I don't really know if it was beautiful but the May 5, 1995 hail storm had a pretty profound impact on me. I was 10 at the time and had been out at Mayfest (a big carnival thing in this park in Fort Worth) a few hours before the storm hit. I remember there was a tornado warning issued and when my family came out of the closet, the sky was yellow, filled with boiling cumulus and it was the most surreal thing I have ever seen in my life to this date. Two days later, my little brother was born in a hospital which had suffered over $5 million (IIRC) in glass damages from softball sized hail. We walked into the archway entrance and the roof was patched with cloth and tarp, but there were probably only about 5 or 6 glass panes remaining of the 60 that were there to begin with. The part of the hospital where my brother was born had suffered no damage, so there was not a problem there. Apparently though, many expectant mothers had been scared into labor by the storm.

Seeing a tornado for the first time last year on June 12 was pretty awesome too, but nowhere close to that hailstorm.
 
there was this one flight when I was a kid where our airliner was weaving around and through single cell storms that were popping up on a summer day in florida. The sun happened to backlight one and the edges were glowing really bright.
 
I don't know about combining sensuality and storm chasing. It just doesn't seem right.

I think mine had to be some awesome mammatus clounds and a bright white overshooting top that I saw last Friday, the 1st of July, in Colorado. Absolutely gorgeous!

Jason
 
May 4th, 2000

The Chicago area had been under a PDS tornado watch, much of the afternoon, but it was cap busted. Seemingly moments after the watch was cancelled, a GIGANTIC supercell developed to the southwest. It did not produce a tornado, but Aurora, IL was hit hard by the slow moving beastly storm. I remeber the setting sun backlighting the clouds with an orange glow, that was really pretty.

That wasn't my first beautiful experience, but a recent one. I also like how when a storm comes through during sunset, the sky turns completely orange at the end. The May 18, 1997 derecho did that. What a transition, from dark green to bright orange.
 
My first beautiful weather of a rotating kind outside of a dust devil was in May 1967 in Mt. Lebanon, PA, a suburb of Pittsburgh where I was living at the time.
All day the sky had a weird yellow color with purplish clouds in it.
Finally towards dinner time a funnel cloud passed within 1/2 mile of my residence. It looked like a tongue sticking out of a hole in the sky, and a couple scud clouds were rotating around the base.
Within a few minutes it dissipated and looked just like a watch spring unwinding before me. Totally fascinating.
 
Ahh, beautiful weather... would probably be the wall cloud 1 mile west of Rochester, MI many years ago (when I was about three or four years into being a tornado spotter).

A perfectly shaped wall cloud, looked like the bottom eighth of a pyramid rotating with a tail cloud trying desperately to withstand the rotation. We drove under it too, lots of rain in the RFD and lots of wind.

Best part was when we got back to Holly about thirty miles north. You could see this absolutely massive supercell on the horizon with a well scuplted anvil. We asked a gas station attendant whether or not the storm came through, she said it did and that twenty minutes before we came in a tornado warning was issued for it.

It became one of those "I told you so" moments between me and my father (seeing as I told him that the wall cloud would probably be warned or drop a tornado around the time the warning was issued).

Another note, the gas station we stopped at had the glass blown out of the front by an F1 tornado on July 2nd, 1997. Still have a tape of the damage a tad to the southwest of the gas station in the forest and fields. We actually pinpointed the exact landing site (judging by the angle at which the treetops were sheared and tossed off at and where the ground damage path became apparent).
 
The fantastic green clouds of a storm that then brought golf ball-size hail. I was 4, and it hooked me on weather from then on.
 
My first amazing experience would have been about 10 years ago or so... It was just after dark and there had been a tornado warning issued for my county although the actual storm was 10-15 miles north of me. We heard the tornado was on the ground and of course my dad and I walked to the end of our country driveway, looked north and there it was! A nice small looking tornado backlit by vivid lightning. My first tornado I had ever seen and I was hooked... :D
 
It was a Sunday afternoon in the 1950s and my parents and I were at the airport in OKC seeing my aunt board a TWA Constellation for her flight back to Los Angeles. A thunderstorm had passed through a few minutes earlier and the runways still had large puddles of water everywhere but the sun was out and everything was looking great with deep blue skies filling in behind the storm.

Then all of a sudden little geysers started erupting from the puddles and clanking sounds were heard as golf ball size hail began bouncing off the parked aircraft. Everyone started running for cover and I remember looking up just before my mom jerked me under an awning and I could see the back side of the thunderstorm all white and fluffy with a huge anvil spread back over us and I could see individual hail stones falling toward me..

The hail didn't last long and since my aunt's flight left on time I guess there was no damage done but it sure was an impressive sight for a young boy who had no idea that kind of thing could happen in sunny skies.
 
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