My son told me that he heard hailstones hitting a tin roof nearby, looked and saw a field of hail moving towards him for several seconds until it starting falling on him.
I thought that was really special since I am 45 and have never seen any weather that I wasn’t in other than lighting I suppose.
I’m just wondering how unusual this is and why. Every snow, hail, rain fall area must have borders. Why would it be so unlikely for people to be standing just outside these borders and happen to be looking in the right direction?
A friend and I were sitting in a car at a stoplight a few years ago and we could see that it was pouring rain about 100 feet ahead of us, but not raining where we were. The light turned green and we drove on into the downpour. It was an eerie feeling.
That was on campus at the University of Minnesota. Crap, I guess it’s been a good eight or nine years since that happened.
As to why it’s so rare, I’d imagine the borders aren’t usually so well-defined. They’re more “fuzzy”, with just a few rain drops or hailstones, and hence not easily visible. It’s more of a gradient than a well-defined border line.
I’ve seen both hail and rain storms approaching. With the hail storm, I was driving and crested a hill to see a wall of white coming down the next hill. At first I thought it was fog. Rather than turn around, like an idiot I continued to drive into it. I ended up with dents all over my car.
At a baseball game (Orioles vs Mariners) a thunderstorm moved in. We watched as a wall of water came over the stadium, marching across the stands and the field from left to right. There was a definite line of demarcation and players and fans went sprinting for cover before it reached them.
I was in jr. high, playing a soccer game in a stadium w/ aluminum stands. The hail storm came sweeping through from the opposite corner of the field (I was playing right fullback). You could hear it pounding down onto the stands, getting closer and closer - it took about 5 seconds for the whole field to be underneath the storm. The somewhat BEmused parents became more Amused when they saw 22 kids plus a ref running around, each with a hand over their eyes to keep the hail out so they could see. After about 5 minutes of this the storm hadn’t stopped, so the ref called the game. It was almost over anyway.
It was the best soccer game ever. Like playing football in the mud.
I’ve often seen precipitation approach, or bypass me while on foot, in a car and on a motorcycle. It’s happened often enough that I think it must be something that we usually simply overlook.
I won quite a few bets in 1987, by predicting the onset of rainstorms to within a few seconds. We’d been spending our afernoons in an outdoor cafe on the “downwind” end of a long Swiss lake, and the summer weather moved through that valley in a predictable direction. The demarcation between the normal smooth reflective surface and the rough dark surface stirred by the rain was easy to see and gauge from a mile or more away. If it was moving in quickly, I’d do a countdown in the last ten seconds (while doing random calculations on my calculator for extra mystery)
In 1996, I stepped out of a hospital on a beautiful sunny Sunday, and saw an intense narrow downpour that didn’t even reach both sides of the large parking lot. I stopped and stupidly watched as it slowly approached. Rarely have I been so thoroughly drenched before I could run back into a building. On the drive drove home, I noticed that its path was clearly visible on the nearby streets. Some stretches where completely wet, while others were completely dry, except for water draining through the gutters.
I was chased by a storm. We were driving and it started raining behind us and we were literally seeing a storm “chasing” us until we stopped and it finally reached the area we were in. It was interesting.
You can usually see rain approaching, or just passing in the distance, if you look for it. Distant rain looks like dark curtains hanging from the clouds. This is a good example photograph.
I had a similar experience in mid west farm country (IA) driving on a graveled county road. It was raining on the fields to my right and the road was dry for several miles. Finally ran past the rainfall.
Your best chance for these encounters comes at sea. At sea, you are very conscious of the weather and even 1/2 a mile means alot. ** Colophon **posted a great picture, and you can navigate in short bursts just on what you see (such as a curtain of rain.)
I can think of three times this has happened to me. Once just like TwoTrouts was at a Mariners @ Orioles game. You could really see the rain moving across the stadium well with the lights (it was a night game). Another was on a camping trip. We were on the top of one mountain and we watched the rain move from the next mountain over, across the valley and up our mountain. The third time was a friend had invited me over to play baseball at his house, I told him it was raining outside, he said that it was sunny. I got on my bike and started to ride across the neighborhood to his house. Sure enough about halfway there it stopped raining. My street and back was wet, and once you crossed this one road, it was bone dry, and sure enough the sun was out.
I played football back in high school. We were practicing in a drizzle and knew that a cold front would hit in the afternoon or evening. About thirty minutes before practice was supposed to end, we felt a cold gust, heard a roar and saw the wall of heavy rain as the cold front crossed the practice fields. The rain was too heavy for us to hear the coaches (and we were practicing on the baseball field), so they called us in and wrapped up practice.
Lots of softball parks are comprised of four fields with home plate, the concession stand, and bleachers at the center. A few years ago I was at a tourney which also had a large gazebo in the middle. We spent a good five minutes under the gazebo watching the heavy rain fall on the west side and the sun shine on the east side.
