We had a close call with a tornado once. We were driving down the highway in torrential rain and strong winds when I got the tornado warning pop up on my phone. There was no one else on the highway except one semi truck. We aren’t used to tornados and weren’t sure what to do, and considered just pulling over, but decided to just get off at the next exit, but that ended up being like 5 more miles, which doesn’t sound like much, but while terrified and driving as fast as I could in heavy rain and winds, it felt like an eternity. When we did find an exit, we pulled into a gas station right by the freeway and ran inside. There were a bunch of locals there who were sheltering but seemed really nonchalant about it.

Checking the news later, the tornado passed only a few miles from us. I know others have worse tornado stories, but this was still one of the scariest things that’s happened to me.

Not as bad as the hurricane stories, but two anecdotes:

1. Recently, we were in Southern France at ~200 kms from Bordeaux. During the wildfires. It had been in the high 30s (Celsius that is, we use science units). At one point, just before sunset, the wind started turning from the direction of the sea, a penetrating smell of smoke started rolling in and it suddenly got very dark. It felt apocalyptic. I feel bad for all people who had to deal with wildfires in any way.
2. Many years ago, I was on a trip to Scotland on a motorcycle trip with a few buddies. It must have been late August, early September. We were in Fort William, which is pretty much at sea level. One day, me and two of my friends decided to climb Ben Nevis, which is the highest peak in the UK at a (relatively modest) 1375-ish meters. We started with sunny weather in the low 20s and as we progressed, we had rain, hailstorms, snow and fog. Oh, and it was freezing at the top. I have not seen so many weather changes in a single day.

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 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.

–

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.

–

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

–

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.

Hurricane Hillary was a weird experience living in the middle of the desert, even though it was a tropical storm by the time it reached us

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.

A couple times I was in major ice storms, one in mid-April, both storms literally covered the entire town in an inch and half of ice, power was out for a week in some places, trees and branches were down on every single block. The one when I was in high school, we didn’t have a generator, so we would just sit in the house fully bundled up in winter gear with a little propane tank space heater attachment thingy (which kinda scared me, but obviously we didn’t blow up or anything or I would have told the story differently lol). Then we’d go over to our neighbors’ house to sleep, since they did have a generator.

The other time I was in college, it was the only time classes ever got cancelled. Thankfully our part of town never lost power. You could hear trees and branches breaking and falling all over town for days, it was wild. My buddies and I decided to go disc golfing, lol, we had to give up after hole 5 because the course started to get hilly and it was nearly impossible to stay upright. We also invented snow-quet, croquet in the snow, that same week. It’s a bit of a misnomer though, since it was really about the thick ice layer on top, it was just too good of a portmanteau. A lot more challenging than regular croquet.

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.

Headed to the coast there was a massive rain storm right on the county line, one side, perfectly dry, on the line? Shower curtain of rain.

Hurricanes Rita and Ike.

As far as Hurricanes go Rita was kind of mild but the crazy part for me was sitting in gridlocked traffic for 24 hours and moving 10 miles. Absolutely destroyed the engine in my car because idling for a long time like that is murder on a gasoline engine. Well that and the bad gas I got at a station off the interstate for $7 a gallon.

Ike was wild though. It was only a cat 2 storm but Houston (where I lived) was on the dirty side and all the debris and rain absolutely pounded the area. When the storm hit I went for a walk around the block because I was 23 and thought I was invincible. I was bowled over by the wind too many times to count and covered in scratches and bruises from all the flying debris.