STRANGE WEATHER STORIES
The Sky is Bleeding!
Showers of blood falling from the sky may sound like something out of a Hollywood horror film, but such scarlet-tinted rains have been reported since ancient Roman times. Though they often horrified the people they fell upon, these rains were not actually blood?they were caused by dust or sand blown into the atmosphere and carried long distances by strong winds, eventually mixing with rain clouds and coloring the rain. In Europe, these red rains are usually dyed by dust carried across the continent from Saharan sand storms. (Other colored rains have also been spotted and seem to be caused by similar sources: pollens can create a startling yellow rain, dust from coal mines and ominous black rain, and some dusts a milky white rain.)
For centuries, people have reported an electrical oddity invading their homes, usually during thunderstorms. Balls of light, ranging from the size of a golfball to a football, occasionally float through the air during storms, undoubtedly surprising anyone they happen to encounter. Known as ball lightning, they have no smell and emit no heat and little sound. They generally disappear with a ?pop? when they encounter something electrical, like a television, though they occasionally explode more violently, sometimes starting fires. These glowing spheres not only mystify those who happen to encounter them, but scientists as well?as yet, there is no prevailing explanation for how ball lightning forms.
Photo Credit: NOAA Photo Library
Ice Fall/Bomb
Most people who have been in a strong thunderstorm have experienced hail, the chunks of ice, usually no larger than a softball, that sometimes fall from the storm clouds. But occasionally hailstones far, far larger (one was recorded at 80 pounds) fall from the sky, startling anyone nearby and often shattering into smaller chunks when they hit the ground. More mysterious are the giant chunks that have sometimes plummeted to the ground without a cloud in the sky. While some such events have been chalked up to ice fall off the wings of planes, others still have no explanation as to what caused them.
Photo Credit: Treasures of the NOAA Library Collection
St. Elmo?s Fires
During thunderstorms, people have reported seeing balls of 'fire' dancing on ships' masts, the horns of cattle, and their own heads. These small, luminous balls, called St. Elmo's fires, are static electric discharges that occur during thunderstorms and course up tall objects. While they aren't dangerous themselves, they can occur before a lightning strike, so it's probably best to get out of the way.
Photo Credit:
Sprites, Jets and Elves, Oh My!
For years, pilots have reported seeing strange colored flashes of light shooting out of the tops of storm clouds, usually to the disbelief of many, But in recent years, scientists have found proof that these strange types of lighting exist. Red sprites are blasts of red light that soar up to 50 miles above the Earth, usually in clusters of two or more. Their cousins, blue jets, are cones of bluish light that occur lower in the atmosphere than red sprites. Occurring at about the same time as red sprites are elves, a pancake-shaped red glow created by the heat of conventional lightning below. These flashes last only thousandths of a second, and scientists are still investigating exactly what causes them.
Photo Credit: Niall Crotty / Stock.xchng
Whirlwinds of Fire
Though they don't have the ferocious, house-lifting winds of a tornado, dust devils can certainly look scary. These whirlwinds, essentially smaller versions of tornadoes, form when there is intense heat at the ground, which causes the air above it to rise, and winds that can cause the rising air to spin. The whirlwind picks up dust from the ground, hence its name. An even scarier relative is the fire devil, which forms over the intense heat of forest fires, pulling up ropes of fire that spin furiously above the blaze.
Photo Credit: NOAA Photo Library
Sea Monster or Spinning Water?
The Loch Ness monster may be nothing more than an overactive column of spinning water. Small whirlwinds, sometimes called 'water devils,' can form over warm water, sucking the water up with them to create a funnel. These water devils can spin around erratically, sometimes making hissing or bubbling noises. These startling sounds combined with the long, neck-like appearance could certainly give anyone nearby the impression that a terrifying sea monster is about to jump out at them.
Photo Credit: Niall Crotty / Stock.xchng
Whirlwinds of Fire
Though they don't have the ferocious, house-lifting winds of a tornado, dust devils can certainly look scary. These whirlwinds, essentially smaller versions of tornadoes, form when there is intense heat at the ground, which causes the air above it to rise, and winds that can cause the rising air to spin. The whirlwind picks up dust from the ground, hence its name. An even scarier relative is the fire devil, which forms over the intense heat of forest fires, pulling up ropes of fire that spin furiously above the blaze.
Photo Credit:
Sprites, Jets and Elves, Oh My!
For years, pilots have reported seeing strange colored flashes of light shooting out of the tops of storm clouds, usually to the disbelief of many, But in recent years, scientists have found proof that these strange types of lighting exist. Red sprites are blasts of red light that soar up to 50 miles above the Earth, usually in clusters of two or more. Their cousins, blue jets, are cones of bluish light that occur lower in the atmosphere than red sprites. Occurring at about the same time as red sprites are elves, a pancake-shaped red glow created by the heat of conventional lightning below. These flashes last only thousandths of a second, and scientists are still investigating exactly what causes them.
Photo Credit: Treasures of the NOAA Library Collection
St. Elmo?s Fires
During thunderstorms, people have reported seeing balls of 'fire' dancing on ships' masts, the horns of cattle, and their own heads. These small, luminous balls, called St. Elmo's fires, are static electric discharges that occur during thunderstorms and course up tall objects. While they aren't dangerous themselves, they can occur before a lightning strike, so it's probably best to get out of the way.
Photo Credit: NOAA Photo Library
Ice Fall/Bomb
Most people who have been in a strong thunderstorm have experienced hail, the chunks of ice, usually no larger than a softball, that sometimes fall from the storm clouds. But occasionally hailstones far, far larger (one was recorded at 80 pounds) fall from the sky, startling anyone nearby and often shattering into smaller chunks when they hit the ground. More mysterious are the giant chunks that have sometimes plummeted to the ground without a cloud in the sky. While some such events have been chalked up to ice fall off the wings of planes, others still have no explanation as to what caused them.
Madison Township Incident
On September 2, 1958 in Madison Township, New Jersey, Dominick Bacigalup survived an experience that to this date has confounded scientists. While sitting at his kitchen table, Dominick was bewildered when the roof and attic of his kitchen exploded with a deafening roar. After Dominick regained his senses, he was puzzle to find that a huge object had crashed through his ceiling. Upon closer examination, he and the authorities determined that the object was a 70 pound block of ice.
Rutgers University was contacted and explained that no known atmospheric conditions could cause such an anomaly. Hail accumulation was ruled out. The FFA cited that the accumulations and release of large blocks of ice were extremely rare - and they were specifically referring to accumulations of 10 pounds or less.
Researcher's Quandary
So while researchers puzzled over the dilemma, accounts of huge blocks of ice falling from the sky continue to be reported. There were large numbers of ice balls reported in Great Britain during a 2 month span in 1950. In 1951 a block of ice 6 feet wide crushed a carpenter working on a roof in West Germany. In 1965 a 50 pound mass of ice smashed through the roof of the Phillips Petroleum Plant in Woods Cross, Utah.
So could these strange occurrences be the result of meteorite or comet fragments? Unfortunately this explanation also falls short. Recent ice falls have been promptly analyzed by researchers. Their findings? The clumps of ice contain nothing more than ordinary ‘cloud water.'
British Incident
Meanwhile, in 1973 a British meteorologist witnesses an ice fall firsthand. Although the icy bomb landed on a Manchester street and shattered into millions of pieces, R.F. Griffiths hastily grabbed one of the smaller fragments and rushed it home to store in his refrigerator. Upon weighing it he was astonished to find that it weighed nearly 4 pounds. At the exact moment of impact many of his fellow Manchester inhabitants noted another strange occurrence. Residents reported a single flash of what appeared to be lightening notable because of its ‘severity and because there were no further flashes’…
SPAIN: GIANT ICE CHUNKS DROP FROM SKIES
In January 2000, Spain came under attack from an unknown assailant. Giant chunks of ice dropped from cloudless skies and crushed car hoods, punched through rooftops and windshields, and slammed into the shoulder of an elderly woman. In a 10-day period, 15 basketball-sized ice balls weighing up to 8 pounds pelted southern Spain.
At first, Spanish authorities deemed the mysterious mass the work of passing aircraft - likely frozen excrement from the lavatory or perhaps condensed ice sliding off the wing - and sent the offending ball to the laboratory to be examined. But then the ice balls kept falling, and new theories emerged: Perhaps it was something extraterrestrial like stray ice from a passing comet, or perhaps a byproduct of some strange new meteorological condition? Was it a hoax? Is it a hoax?
Jesus Martinez-Frias, a senior scientist at the Center for Astrobiology in Madrid, raced all over Spain collecting the chunks of ice preserved by witnesses and brought them back to the lab for analysis. Martinez-Frias and his team found that the ice balls did not contain human excrement or the trademark blue disinfectant used in airplane toilets. They also discovered that the ice balls did not fall from an airplane¹s fuselage because the sites did not correspond with known flight paths.
They also found there was nothing extraterrestrial about them. Martinez-Frias and his co-workers discovered that the ice had the chemical signature of this world¹s hailstones.
Of course, after the story broke, a couple of merry pranksters made fraudulent ice balls- one out of salt, the other taken from a restaurant freezer- which were easily identifiable as imposters not only because of their chemical signature, but also because they lacked the trademark onionskin layering of hailstones.
Most hailstones are the size of peas and weigh a fraction of an ounce; sometimes they reach the size of baseballs. The largest hailstone on record in the United States weighed in at 27 ounces - nowhere close to the 6 to 8 pound monsters that dropped on Spain. The really big hailstones usually accompany ferocious thunderstorms that produce tornados.
Hailstones are formed by winds known as updrafts that blow upward in thunderstorms. The droplets of supercooled water - water that is at a temperature below freezing, but not yet ice - are carried upward where they hit ice crystals, freezing them instantly and causing the ice ball to grow. Hailstones cycle between the updraft to the top of the cloud, the descent along the outer edge of the cloud, and back up again. The hailstones grow with each revolution until they become too heavy for the updraft to lift anymore, and they fall out the bottom of the cloud.
Which is why, what scientists are now calling megacryometeors are so puzzling. If megacryometeors really are big hailstones, the updrafts would have to be extremely strong. And you would expect that they would be accompanied by the storm of the century, but instead they have fallen from cloudless skies.
Since the deluge of megacryometeors that rained on Spain in January 2000, the Martinez-Frias team has studied and followed this phenomenon; and they have found that this phenomenon isn¹t unique to Spain. Argentina, Australia, Austria, Canada, Colombia, The Netherlands, New Zealand, and the United States have reported a megacryometeor event. In all, there have been more than 50 confirmations, and the researchers believe that is only a small fraction of the actual number. The ice balls are getting larger too: 25 and 35 pounders are frequently reported. Recently, Brazil reported a 440-pound behemoth.
So what's the deal - really big hail or something else?
Global warming might be to blame: The researchers found a meteorological anomaly on the days preceding the megacryometeorological events; ozone levels were unusually low over southeastern Spain, which allowed more solar radiation to reach the troposphere, thereby cooling the lower stratosphere.
Another meteorological team found that the lower stratosphere was unusually moist during the 10 days the ice balls fell. They speculated that the nuclei of the ice ball could have been lingering jet contrails that then descended through a nearly saturated atmosphere.
There have been detractors. Some meteorologists and hail experts have denounced the theories posed by Martinez-Frias, stating that formation of hail without thick highly-visible clouds is an impossibility.
However, in the summer of 2002, Martinez-Frias and fellow researchers proposed a novel mechanism for generating what one would constitute as hail on a clear day.
Perhaps megacryometeors is the work of a master prankster; perhaps it's the byproduct of global warming. I'm sure we¹ll soon find out. After all, the sky is rising - say scientists in California.