I’ve been in 3 tornadoes… don’t wish to be in any more. If you see a green sky, get into a basement if you can and an interior room if you can’t.

In the early 2000s I was at the beach on Long Island. It was midday, a cloudless sky, and hot. Suddenly there was a lot of shouting and pointing, and off in the distance you could barely see a water spout, like a tornado over the water and made of water. It went up into this tiny, dense little cluster of angry looking clouds that were just completely alone in the sky. As it got closer it started to hail golfball-size hailstones they were kind of hollow, like the good, crunchy ice from a fast food soda fountain. We got pelted for maybe 30 seconds and then the spout changed directions and headed out to sea, and the weather went back to normal as if nothing had happened. I occasionally ask my sister (who was there with me at the time) if she remembers, because it seems so odd I think I’m gaslighting myself.

In 2022 we had “calima” in southern Spain. It happens when wind blows in sand from Sahara and is quite common but this one was insane. I only have one shitty picture of it:

There’s no filter here and it’s in the middle of the day. This is what everything looked like. This is what it normally looks like:

It was as if the whole world got an instant sepia filter. When you were walking outside you could fell the sand in your eyes. Everything got covered in a thin layer of red sand. They had to pressure wash the whole region:

We get the occasional tornado here, but thankfully I have never seen one up close.

We get a shit-ton of hailstorms though, and occasionally the hailstones are big enough that if you’re outside during one, you’ll probably need a trip to the hospital. A lot of the older cars have golfball style dents and pretty much everyone has a story about trying to get insurance payots for holes in the siding of their house.

I mean I live in Nebraska so outside of tornados, hail, downpours, thunder-snow, 90 mph wind gusts, and extreme temperature changes over 24 hours ive seen mostly everything nature can throw at us.

I guess the weirdest was this one. In Nebraska weather at least during heavy thunderstorms comes from west and travels east. Sometimes from the south and sometimes north but never from the east.

This one came from the west, went east. Stopped, went back west with no precip and sat there building for a couple of hours. When it finally pushed east again. It was one of the hardest rainfalls I’ve ever seen

almost got direct hit by a night tornado while driving home from work. it killed something like 5 or 6 people on the freeway, and the only reason I saw it was because it hit a transformer junction after the freeway which backlit it.

I turned around to avoid an intercept course and sped back down the highway and it then crossed the lake and smashed several whole neighborhoods where friends of mine lived, including my gf at the time.

when I got to the intersection with the freeway there were cars just sitting there at the red light, wind raging and howling, signs swinging back and forth, literal tumbleweed rolling through lmao. ironically it was a cop car reaching the intersection after me that flashed his lights and horns/sirens that made everyone snap out of it and we all ran the red light together.

tried to go back down the original route towards my friends blocks but between downed power lines, chunks of house blocking the roads and emergency services setting up I couldn’t get very far.

edit to add uplifting part: one of my friends whose house was destroyed kept parakeets. over a year later, after the rebuild, they were walking their dog and heard chirping from a neighbor’s garage. they had taken shelter there and the neighbor was taking care of them, was happy to return them. :)

In Ramsgate, Kent a couple years ago we had a lightning storm that lasted hours, with bolts nearby every few minutes or seconds for the whole time. Rain coming down like pencils, ten seconds outside drenched me completely. Lightning is my favourite weather to watch, it used to give me a frisson. That night I got bored of it.

2 major examples and 1 fun one.

1. Hurricane Floyd. I lived on the top of a mountain. Next to the major road to go into town was a park/glen. The year prior the trees got infected with some type of Japanese beetle so the town ripped all infected trees out and replanted. Because it was only a year though the roots had not really spread into the ground though. The hurricane came through and the edge of the Glen gave way without those solid roots and the road literally washed into the the Glen. Two other ways into town, one had about 8 blind hair pin turns(not meant for lots of traffic or school buses), the other was basically down other side and loop around the mountain adding between an hour to an hour and a half onto your trip(including getting to/from school). That year SUCKED to be in school with a 2 hour commute each way.

2. Hurricane sandy. Lived in same place, hurricane came though but at this point I was working. My job got running 2 days later, I got power back a month later and tv/internet 2 weeks after power. I spent a lot of time at the office because they had light, heat, working toilets, and TV in the break room. I had a well system at the house, no power to run pump no water, no toilets or shower. I had a oil furnace but couldn’t light it with power to charge the ignition.

3. This is not as serious, I moved to my own apartment across the country. One night I was playing metro 2033, lights out in room, door closed, headphones on. I was completely immersed as I was traveling through this train tunnel scanning for monsters jumping out at me. All I could hear was the occasional screech of monsters and the squeel of the train wheels on the track. All of the sudden a lightning bolt struck my balcony railing in real life. My entire room lit up for a burst and a large crack could be heard. I don’t know how I managed to keep my underwear clean…

I see I’ve got a fellow Hurricane Floyd survivor here. Here’s my story:

I was living in eastern NC at the time. What I remember is they expected the storm to pass through during the night. So we hunkered down, went to bed, I remember waking up a couple times during the night and hearing the wind but I didn’t get up to look.

In the morning I stepped outside and discovered that I couldn’t go anywhere. My apartment was at the top of an incline near a creek and most of what was below us was underwater. So many of my neighbors lost their homes, their cars…the streets were flooded. It was like living on an island. We had no power so I cooked with a little propane camping grill. I remember power being out for a couple days. Only once the power came back on did we realize the full extent of the damage. I vividly remember aerial footage of dead livestock floating in floodwaters.

I worked at a small music store at the time and it got completely gutted. Flood water came in the back entrance, went out the front entrance, and carried almost all our gear away with it. We had to reconstruct the entire interior of the building and purchase all new inventory. We weren’t able to open for business for almost two weeks.

Funny story about that: A few weeks later a guy came in carrying a power amp he said he found about a quarter mile away alongside the highway. He assumed it was ours. We checked the serial number and it was in fact ours, but by that time we had already received insurance and emergency funds and were able to write off almost all the lost inventory. So we said he could keep it. Couple weeks later he came back, said he disassembled it, let it all air dry for a couple days, reassembled it, and it worked fine. Dude scored a $700 power amp for free.

Flash flood on the freeway back from Vegas. It was raining so hard we had to yell over it, then a semi passed us, dumped a waterfall on the windshield and the car in fronts tail lights stretched so far vertically we couldn’t gauge distance anymore and pulled over.

In my infinite wisdom after a week of filandering in the desert I elected to “experience the storm,” I got out, raised my arms, and felt every hair on my body stand up.

Scurried back in before my appointment with God.

Hurricane with 2 week blackout following it.

Tornado but it was a block away - the sky was GREEN. I looked out the window and thought “that’s odd” then my brother called and said there is a tornado by you go take the kids to an interior room (hallway was best we could do). It knocked down a checkers and a car dealership, tossed cars around.

Well I’ve got three answers to that.

The most severe weather I sheltered in place from was hurricane Fran. Fortunately it didn’t rearrange my family’s own chunk of the forest too bad but some trees were thrown on a few houses.

The most severe weather I’ve experienced unsheltered was Hurricane Noel. The dumbfuck 20 year old I used to be decided to ride a motorcycle from Daytona to West Palm Beach for no particular reason. I got my giblets rinsed. That wasn’t the most unpleasant weather I’ve ever been in though, I rode that same motorcycle through a freezing rain storm about 3 years later. I kept having to pound my fist into my visor to de-ice it.

The worst aftermath of weather I’ve seen but wasn’t personally in was an EF-3 tornado. It was on the ground for over an hour, it cut a path a thousand feet wide and easily 50 miles long, tearing through forest, neighborhoods and commercial districts. I worked as a flight instructor at a nearby airport, so afterward I got a fairly good look at the damage path from the air. It looked kind of like a logging operation, you know how they’ll take a parcel of land and clear cut it either for development or for the timber? Except smeared across the landscape crossing roads and taking houses and buildings with the trees.

I got a few stories

If we want to count “smoke” as weather, wildfire smoke blowing in from Canada was pretty crazy

I work in 911 dispatch and was working the night in first started hitting our area. We got a couple calls about smoke, which didn’t immediately seem like anything too unusual. We sent the police and fire department out to look for where it was coming from and they confirmed that yeah, there was smoke, but no obvious source. It of course didn’t blanket our whole county at once, and as I recall the weather was fairly nice and at first we were kind of writing it off as a couple people having big bonfires somewhere.

But as the night went on we kept getting more calls. Eventually we were somehow alerted about the wildfire situation. When someone called about smoke we still sent someone to check in case there was actually a fire somewhere, but we also advised our callers about the wildfire smoke, and basically everyone I told was brown away by that.

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Hurricane Ida hit my area pretty hard. It hit on my day off. About a year before my area had gotten hit pretty hard by another storm and we had historic flooding, power was out for a good chunk of the day, and with that in mind I ran out to get a battery backup for our sump pump the morning before it hit. My wife wasn’t sure if that was necessary, but we again lost power for like 16 hours so we were glad to have it.

Once the storm was well underway, of course I got the page from work that anyone able to come in was needed to handle the call volume. I made an attempt to get in, but every direction I went I encountered flooding, I don’t think I made it a half mile from home in any direction before needing to turn around.

The storm the year prior was the worst flooding in our area since they started keeping records, and it was by a pretty solid margin. Ida demolished that record. It took them a week or so to figure out how much it broke that record by because it totally swamped the gauge at the river where they measured it.

Like I said, we lost power for about 16 hours, I have some friends nearby who are on a well for their water. They have a generator to keep their fridge and freezer running but it’s not enough to also run their well pump. We’re on city water but have no generator, so after the storm passed we ran our perishables over to them to throw in their fridge, and they came to our house to take a shower and fill some jugs with water.

Before that, I had tried to go out to try to grab some ice for our cooler. Without power, the one store I could get to of course wasn’t open. I tried to get to somewhere else, and at that point I couldn’t make it much further than the night before. In some places it was because of downed trees and wires and such, but in others it was because some roads and bridges were just totally washed out.

Also, the main reason we lost power was because the substation that provides power to our area ended up underwater.

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If we want to count solar weather, seeing the northern lights from my home in 2024 was wild.

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Back when I was in scouts, I went out to Philmont, which is a big property in New Mexico for scouts to go backpacking.

I don’t think that area is technically considered a desert, but it was certainly a lot drier than what I’m used to at home.

At least it usually is.

We got to basecamp, everything was pretty dry and dusty. We do all of our orientation and checking in and such, and settle in for the night before starting our trek the next day. At Basecamp they have you in canvas wall tents on a wooden platform (if you search for something like “scout summer camp tents” you’ll see exactly what I’m talking about)

It downpoured that night, apparently the most rain they’d gotten in a single night in the last 10 years.

Coincidentally 10 years prior was the last time my troop sent a group to Philmont, and they also got rained on pretty hard.

I think because it was usually so dry they got a little lax in waterproofing their tents. It was blowing sideways and kind of worked its way through the seams of the tent. So if you were on one side you were fine, but on the other side of the tent you got wet.

I was on the wet side. Luckily the first couple drops hit my face and woke me up. I checked with my tent mate and he was fine. I packed up my sleeping bag so it wouldn’t get wet, pulled on some warm clothes and my rain gear and crawled under my cot, and that did a pretty solid job of keeping me dry. A lot of people ended up needing to dry out their gear the next morning before starting their trek.

Again, I don’t know if that area is technically a desert, but you hear about how the desert comes alive after the rain, plants bloom really quickly and all of that, and we did see a little bit of that happening, things were definitely greener the next day than when we arrived.

We also ended up having to hike an extra couple miles the first day that we planned because the bus that was supposed to drop us off at the trailhead wouldn’t be able to make it through some of the mud.

A few days into our trek, our itinerary had us camping near the top of a mountain. It would be a dry campsite with no potable water available, so we made the call to have our dinner for that day for lunch, since it was freeze dried stuff that needed water to cook, so we could refill our water when we had the chance to last us through the next day.

As we start up the mountain, a thick fog rolled in. By the time we made it to the top we were all pretty cold, damp and miserable and didn’t even have a hot meal to look forward to. We pretty much set up our tents and went to bed.

The next morning we woke up to a clear, beautiful day. We go to the top of the mountain to appreciate the view, and look down into the valley below and see… Clouds. Just a couple of them drifting by. And we realized that the fog we hiked through and camped in the day before had been a cloud.

If a mattress salesman ever tells you “it’s like sleeping on a cloud” - run. Clouds suck for sleeping.

We had two crews doing different trucks that took us through different parts of Philmont. The other crew at some point got caught in a thunderstorm where lightning was striking way too close for comfort and had to spend some time crouched down in the lightning position while it passed.

Was in a tornado that tore the roof up and collapsed the building I was in. It’s a miracle I survived. If I wouldn’t have dove into the doorway the walls would have crushed me.

It does, in fact, sound exactly like a train barreling through your living room.

Hurricane.

Winds were so strong I could hear the house creaking as it was passing over. Stripped the shingles off my roof to where it was raining in the bedrooms. Ceilings collapsed because the insulation and drywall became waterlogged. I got hit on the head from that because I was trying to pull stuff out of the master bedroom before everything got waterlogged. Fortunately, drywall was soft enough where it didn’t cause a concussion. Tree fell on my home. Another lucky break because it was only leaning on it and didn’t cause any structural damage.

Next day rode around on my bike to see the extent of the damage. Shingles everywhere. Some with the roofing nails still attached, and some were embedded into the siding of various homes. All wooden privacy fences knocked down, destroyed. A few of the slats were broken up to the point where they looked like crude wooden spears. A bunch of duplexes had their fire alarms constantly beeping. Not because there was a fire, but because they were running on battery power instead of mains power (really stupid design).

Saw one home were it was a two story but became a one story. Roof completely collapsed in. 2nd floor walls mostly gone. Inside I could see a tangled mess of the family’s furniture and the wooden support structure.

For the 2nd worse home I saw, the wind had pushed in where the garage door used to be and ripped off the roof from the inside. About 2/3rds of the trust structure was exposed to the elements. That one hit me in the feels because I had just met that family the week before.

Venturing out further, most of the power poles were knocked and the power lines and transformers were laying in the streets. All the stop lights were dead, obviously from the lack of power. Most survived the winds though. Most of the trees, if there weren’t knocked over, had their leaves stripped off. Stop signs, they were gone. The wind shook them back and forth so much that the metal became fatigued and snapped them off by the base. Saw the same thing with a tractor trailer. Looked like Godzilla snapped it in half, all from the wind and metal fatigue.

Over the next couple of days, it was a constant wailing of ambulances. They were evacuating patients out of the hospitals.

That was definitely an experience, living in a half destroyed home for a year rebuilding and dealing with an insurance company that was ill equipped to handle the influx of claims.