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…

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.

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.

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.

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.

My story is more tame compared to the others listed, but still a wild 15 minutes for me.

I was walking from my house to a friend’s on a warm April day. As I left my house I saw some rain clouds but figured it was a quick 15 minute walk and I’d be fine, no need for an umbrella.

The first five minutes of my walk, the clouds quickly changed, shit, rain was coming. Sure enough, downpour. Buckets of water coming out of the sky.

Then it paused, for a moment, only for it to start hailing. Bright sun but hail dropping from the sky.

Then nothing. Clear skys, bright sun, a beautiful April day. I picked the exact wrong 15 minutes to go outside.

Not the worst, but the weirdest happened while I was fishing in Minnesota. We were in a boat on an empty lake. It was a bright clear day without a could in the sky. While we fished we watched a single small black cloud blow over the lake. As we watched, this little lone angry cloud homed in right for our boat. Just before it passed over us, it started dumping rain. It wasn’t more than 100ft wide, but it passed right over us. After that the cloud dissipated and blew away. The weather was totally clear the rest of the day. It was the most personalized storm ever.