The Weirdest Weather Ever Recorded
Lightning that strikes the same lake 300 nights a year, fish that fall out of the sky on schedule, red rain, and snow in the Sahara.
Weather records are kept carefully, which is what makes the strange ones strange: they are measured, not reported third-hand.
Lightning on a timetable
Where the Catatumbo river meets Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela, storms form on up to around 300 nights a year and can produce hundreds of flashes an hour, for nine or ten hours at a stretch. Sailors used it to navigate. It is the most reliable lightning on the planet, and it goes off at night almost on cue.
Raining fish, every year, in the same town
Yoro in Honduras holds a festival called the Lluvia de Peces — the rain of fish. After a heavy early-summer storm, small fish are found on the ground away from the river. The usual explanation is a waterspout picking them up, though some researchers think they are driven up out of underground water instead. Either way the town has been celebrating it since the 1800s.
Red rain
Dust lifted from the Sahara rides high into the atmosphere and falls on southern Europe mixed with rain, leaving cars and windows orange-brown. It reaches Britain several times a decade. Before anyone understood it, blood rain was read as an omen, and it is in the chronicles as one.
Snow in the Sahara
Ain Sefra in Algeria, at the desert's northern edge, has had settling snow several times — in 1979, and again in 2016, 2018 and since. Red dunes under a white dusting is one of the odder photographs the weather produces.
The hottest and coldest readings
The official record high is 56.7°C at Furnace Creek in Death Valley, set in 1913, and still argued over by climatologists. The record low is −89.2°C at the Soviet Vostok station in Antarctica in 1983. The coldest permanently inhabited place is Oymyakon in Siberia, which has dropped near −68°C — cold enough that cars are left running all day.
Hail the size of a football
A hailstone that fell at Vivian, South Dakota, in 2010 measured 8 inches across and weighed nearly two pounds. It is the largest ever officially measured in the United States, and it left a crater in the ground.
Fire whirls
A big enough fire makes its own weather. When the rising column of hot air starts to spin it can form a rotating pillar of flame tens of metres high. One of the worst recorded came after the 1923 Great Kanto earthquake in Japan, where a fire whirl killed thousands of people sheltering in an open yard.
The quietest killer
Britain's strangest weather event was not dramatic at all. In December 1952 cold, still air trapped coal smoke over London for four days. The Great Smog was thick enough to stop buses and get into cinemas, and it is now estimated to have killed at least 4,000 people and probably far more. It produced the Clean Air Act of 1956.