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...

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.

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.

Was in a tornado that tore the roof up and collapsed the building I was in. It's a miracle I survived. If I wouldn't have dove into the doorway the walls would have crushed me.

It does, in fact, sound exactly like a train barreling through your living room.

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.

weather around here (central switzerland) is normally pretty mild, but a few years ago there was this extremely localized burst of intense hail that went through my town. the hailstones were maybe 7cm across, on my entire street every single solar panel/skylight/south-facing window without overhang/car windshield was completely smashed to bits. nearer the village center the hail wasn't as big, but there was so much of it that there was a mountain of hail sitting outside the train station for a week in midsummer heat.

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.

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.

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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.

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

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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.

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.

March 1993: The Storm of the Century. It caused snow to fall in every part of Georgia. From the mountains down to the Florida line.

In the north Georgia mountains it caused a thunder blizzard. High winds, lightning, and 3+ feet of snow in a matter of hours. This is in a part of the country that rarely gets a dusting of snow. 10s of thousands of trees down. The sound of pine trees snapping in the middle of the night sounded like cannon's being fired. Power was out for more than a week in many places in the mountains. It took four days for me to get a clear path cut from my home to the main road.

The first shower I had in more than a week was when I made it down to Atlanta for the Grateful Dead shows.

When I lived on a slightly tall hill, we had a lot of lightning one night.

2 cyclones and a

firestorm (pyro cumulonimbus) that destroyed our village and a zillion acres in Australia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumulonimbus_flammagenitus

I'd take the cyclone

also 3 minor earthquakes (northern Thailand, New Zealand and The Philippines, in a what the fucking, fuck was that as the building shakes and near one volcano (Taal), I was in Tagaytay

I'm jinxed :)

Not experienced personally when it happened, but...

There is that forest valley we pass through on our annual pilgrimage. We have to take a wooden bridge over a small brook there. That water is so small that pilgrims even crossed it by removing shoes and socks and wading through at a time the bridge was broken.

Five years ago, there were heavy rainfalls and flash floods in the area. At the point where that bridge was, the water ran 8m/26ft high. Imagine standing there and looking up the cliffs left and right where once were trees. The bridge has been replaced, but the valley definitely looks different.

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.

the wildfires in the 2020, made the whole sky red and dark, and breathing difficult.

The Alberta prairies don't really get the extremes others experience, at least not near the cities or within my lifetime. There's tornadoes here of course but the colder climate usually neuters them. Sometimes they take out a trailer park or threaten towns closer to the rocky mountains. Top 5 most snow on record last year so I had to finally get a snowblower which roomy and I found one non-working for free and fixed it up. Blizzards, wind storms, fog. That's about it unless forest fire smoke counts as weather.

That's pretty boring so, I'll retell my dad's. My dad saw the F4 class tornado of August 1987 up close at the chemical plant he worked at the time. In Edmonton, Alberta that day was called Black Friday. No relation to the shopping slop day. According to him they didn't really know what they were looking at as it tore by the plant nearly hitting them and saw it reach the outskirts of the city, throwing debris everywhere. He remembers the sound it made vividly. Creepy howlng sound, and the sky was full of boiling green dark clouds.

I've seen those boiling dark green clouds once myself in 2014 or so but besides looking very disturbing, no tornado that time. It's strange, I watch videos of tornadoes in the USA but I guess the boiling clouds don't capture well on video or they're just different idk. If you know of Styropyro the mad scientist, he has a second channel where he chases tornadoes I've been watching.

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.

I’ve been in two hurricanes, once in Mexico and one in Hawaii a few weeks ago. Both times I was on the very edge of the storm so it never hit me that hard

-40F to +40F in about a four hour period.

Where I'm from, we're having volcanic ash right now.

During a heatwave here in the UK earlier this year I was travelling down south. But for 10 minutes out of nowhere we got literal apocalyptic levels of halistones. It sounded like they were going to pierce through the roof of my car. It became hard to see and loads of people actually ended up pulling over just in case. Then it just ended as quickly as it started and 5 minutes later it was so hot again that there was no trace of any water anywhere.

This actually happened again a week or two later, but I was at home so it wasn't as crazy feeling as it was whilst driving.

There was one day in my city where a catastrophic hailstorm absolutely brought the city to a standstill. Hail the size of golf balls clogged drains, causing roads everywhere to flood and stopping traffic, but more importantly, dented the skin and smashed the windscreens of like 30% of the cars in the city, writing them off.

I worked for an autoglass supplier at the time, and for the next 2 weeks, we were shipping every bit of glass we could get our hands on until the warehouse was bare. Glaziers were working 16 hours a day to fix the glass on thousands of cars. It was pretty wild.

• Snowdrifts so high, travelling in a train like this (5000PS, 80t) felt like hitting waves on a boat.
• Cycling against a 90km/h headwind.(Walking would have been easier and faster, but the way back was glorious)
• Camping in a storm with 11 Beaufort gusts on a rockfestival and seeing a helicopter abort his landing attempt and a Pavillon tent roll by like a tumbleweed.

When it's raining but just in, like, one spot where you can go into it and then go out of it again is just about the craziest weather I've experienced.

Unless earthquakes count as "weather." I was in "the big one" of '89 in California. I was only 4, but I remember it knocking me down when I was walking across the street and then sprinting home because of it.

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.

blizzard of 78.

so much snow entire families were begging to get out of their homes for it.

Closest I've had is weather that starts on one block but suddenly is completely different on another. What I mean is you'll get rain on one block and then it almost magically won't continue next block over despite basically having those same exact rain clouds.

Perfect example: a couple blocks away from me a few days ago it started suddenly pouring rain like Noah was building his ark. Went a couple blocks away and there isn't a single drop to be found anywhere.

Although, there is another weird thing I am not 100% sure I hallucinated weather wise. My neck of the woods doesn't get any sort of tornadoes, twisters, whatever. But one day in 8th grade, during some cheesy "you're moving onto high school" type celebration, we were all out in a large field where all the festivities were set up. I swear some tiny, insignificant tornado or something spawned because I swear I remember blades of grass and some inflatable ball being picked up and moved around. Again, I'm not sure if that was a hallucination

Maybe hail. At least one of the times I saw hail. It was a clear and sunny day without a cloud in the sky

Or a wall of rain. Once when I was a kid it was a race to get home: a wall of rain was coming through and I tried to make it back in time to stay dry

To answer the title question... many years ago I experienced a polar vortex that caused about a 100 degree temperature drop in less than 24 hours, that was pretty fun.

To address the body of OP, I would start taking important things out of the house and storing them somewhere safe.. but I would think more storms = more damage = more likely the insurance cant deny you.

Worst: Driving through a large Midwest city in the US on the freeway. Started raining. NBD. Then it got a lot harder. The wind really picked up fast. I've been around gust fronts and the like for thunderstorms before, this was unlike anything I've been through before. It got wild, fast. Tree parts and other debris started blowing past, it looked like what you'd think a tornado would, but it was far too widespread. Then the crazy thing...along with the wind, rain, and debris, the visibility dropped to near zero with a fog or mist in the span of a minute. We had to pull over and stop with everyone else, nobody could see for a few minutes. I have never seen that happen before, the rapid and violent change to weather and visibility over such a large area.

Coolest: Driving over the western High Desert in the US. Got caught up in a snowstorm with lots of wind. Found a safe place to spend the night after some white-knuckle driving for an hour or two. Plenty of vehicles pushed by wind or slid off the road, we were some of the only stupid ones left driving. No place to park safely, not enough gas for the rest of the night to keep warm. Don't want to be the dead ones found with CO poisoning by the highway patrol the next day. Anyway, woke up the next day and it was crystal clear, literally. The air was full of fine ice crystals blowing in the wind. The bright sun had a huge halo and cross like a "+" along with some other tangential arcs that felt both close and far away to us at ground level. I'm sure folks in colder climes see these, but it was a new one to me. Pretty wild to see.

Mine maybe pretty vanilla. I was in Oklahoma in 2014 and I experienced a hail storm with lightning and then a sandstorm in evening.