We just had a hail storm blow through. Twenty minutes ago it was sunny and 85 degrees, then marble- to golf ball-sized ice nuggets are belting everything in sight. Ah, spring in Texas.
Hail has got to be one of the freakiest weather phenomena around, second to tornadoes. (Hurricanes are awesome and mysterious, but they develop over time, they don’t whip up out of nowhere.) I always wonder what it was like back in the day, to be a lonesome cowpoke riding out on the prairie when suddenly–WHAM! Chunks of ICE! Whar in tarnation …
So, Dopers, what’s your wierdest weather experience?
Growing up in Southern California, I went ouside one day, and drops of water fell from the sky. It was strange. I was told later that people call it “rain”.
For summer vacation, my family and I go to Lake Havasu on the California/Arizona border. It is part of the Colorado River, for those who don’t know. Anywho, the monsoon season is very rough out there. Our family always seems to be stuck on some sandbar in the middle of a storm. Lightning, raindrops that could tear your skin off…and wind. The worst part is the wind. The waves get BIG when the wind picks up. There are whitecaps everywhere. There is no place to hide. The following is just one of the many stories in which we decide to stay just a little bit longer.
Well, we have a little ski boat. Out on the lake one day, a monsoon storm brewed just for us. We started heading in to the marina when the waves started getting big enough to sink the boat. We were taking in a lot of water, so my dad turns to my mom and yells,“If we start sinking or going over, grab dlgirl!” When I heard that, I started bawling. I did not want to die! :eek:
We got to the marina safely, pulled the boat out, went to our place of residence, and ate dinner to the sound of the wind tearing things apart. When we got up the next morning, someone informed us that a lot of boats had sunk in the marina. We were lucky that we got off of the lake in time.
Highway 24 in Colorado. Generally sunny skies, hailing hard in the westbound lanes, sunny going eastbound. There was an actual line down the middle of the road where the road was wet with hail right up to the middle, & dry going the other way. That was odd.
I was in a truck stop in Iowa when a bigassed tornado tore through an adjacent cornfield. The suction from the wind was so great I couldn’t leave my truck to go in the building. The sky turned dark green, it became silent for a few seconds, then this freight train deafening roar started up and the whole place was pelted with clods of dirt and corn. People were yelling all over the CBs, then it passed. It tore a huge rut alongside I80, but no real damage was done. Pretty cool, in retrospect, but scary for a few minutes!
At college, staring out the window at the thunderstorm that overtook the sky in like ten seconds flat. You know how hyperbolic authors will sometimes refer to “boiling skies?” That actually happens, it turns out. Clouds churning like, yes, a boiling cauldron. Fascinating and awesome, in a wrath-of-God sort of way.
I arrived at my work forty-five minutes after a huge hailstorm which hit Sydney a year or two ago, and the hail stones were still larger than golf balls. Some had been tennis ball sized. The people who’d been there during the storm said they initially thought a plane had crashed taking off from the nearby airport, such was the incredible noise. Driving to work, the road was merely wet. Then, I turned into a side street, and my car was crunching over leaves, branches, and huge chunks of ice. None of the actual road surface was visible. The hail had stripped the trees bare. The freaky thing was the clear line where the hail started. Every car in the area had been damaged, and many houses were unroofed.
Yesterday, I tried to sneak off from work to the pub in the middle of a torrential downpour. Bugger, the road to the pub was blocked by police because it was flooded. I turned to go down a side street, and saw water across it. I was unsure whether to risk driving through it or not. My answer came when a taxi floated past. An hour later, there was no water at all.