Crimean Bridge, Krasnodar Krai, Russia
Paris, France
Weather
Way-out Weather
The biggest dust storm in living memory rolls into Phoenix on July 5, 2011, reducing visibility to zero. Desert thunderstorms kicked up the mile-high wall of dust and sand.
Fortified by a levee, a house near Vicksburg survives a Yazoo River flood in May 2011. Snowmelt and intense rains—eight times as much rainfall as usual in parts of the Mississippi River watershed—triggered floods that caused three to four billion dollars in damages.
Lightning cracks during an eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcano in 2010.
The eruption of Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano inspires the formation of a waterspout in this undated photo.
A Lake Michigan lighthouse takes the brunt of a frigid winter in Saint Joseph, Michigan.
A funnel cloud rips through a trailer park near Cheyenne, Wyoming, in this undated photo. The photographer snapped this shot from a quarter mile away before taking cover in his basement.
A waterspout parallels a lightning strike over Lake Okeechobee in Florida. A sister of the tornado, waterspouts are generally less powerful.
Adding insult to injury, this dangerously large hail rode in on the coattails of a tornado that hit Joplin, Missouri, in 2011.
A tornado heads toward two cars on a country road near Campo, Colorado.
In a dramatic display of summer atmospheric conditions, lightning marks the end of an impressively long shelf cloud in the Midwestern U.S.
Dark clouds loom over a beach on Grand Cayman Island.
Landslide rubble buries a car in northern India’s Doda district in 2011. The devastating erosion was the result of a downpour that washed soil, rocks, and other debris onto the Doda-Batote highway.
Video shows giant hailstones pelting Germany
You really wouldn’t want to be outside in this. Image Credit: Twitter / @filiusmontium
The Munich region of Germany was hammered by hailstones the size of tennis balls earlier this week.
The huge chunks of ice, which measured up to six centimeters in diameter, pelted homes and gardens while torrential downpours flooded the streets, causing widespread disruption.
Several people, including a 7-year-old boy, were reportedly injured by the falling ice.
The below video, which is one of several uploaded on to social media of the extreme weather, shows the sheer mayhem wrought by the gargantuan hailstones as they rained down on a residential garden.
The spectacle of the ice hitting the pond in the middle of the frame is particularly intense.
“I’ve never experienced anything like it before,” said local man Roberto De Angelis.
Photos of Very Ominous Looking Storms
The photos are from New Mexico, North and South Dakota, Oklahoma and Wyoming.
Chicago Skyscrapers Hit by Lightning
The Windy City is mighty pretty: Dazzling lightning illuminates the Chicago skyline and strikes four skyscrapers
Mother nature’s power and beauty were on full display in Chicago Monday night when lightning lit up the city’s skyline.
The electric bursts reportedly struck four of the city’s tallest buildings in a rare occurrence of what’s called ‘upward lightning,’ according to the Washington Post.
The phenomenon usually involves tall man-made structure, like skyscrapers, and follows the more common cloud-to-ground lightning strikes.
Upward strikes typically occur after positive charges from a cloud to ground strike leave an imbalance of positive energy on a building or tower, which shoots a bolt into the sky to meet and balance out a mirroring negative charge.
All the buildings struck by lightning were reportedly taller than 1,000 feet
