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For me, it would have to be : The Northern Lights or Water Spouts over the Ocean (not hurricanes but well defined Water Spouts as the WeatherMan said ) . How about you ? And...if you have a picture of it...PLEASE post it for us !
I'd have to say when i was in Menorca and its was about 40C/ 110F and there was a watersporout which came all the way onto the beach! Scary stuff for someone who extreme weather is about 2cm of snow!
First time I saw thunder/lightning with a heavy, wet snowstorm, very scarey. These big old maple trees in our neighborhood had limbs cracking, luckily no serious damage or injuries. I was outside watching (younger, foolish days) someone made me go in the house!
A microburst on an inland, manmade lake when I was a teenager. We were sailing in a race when the microburst hit -- sudden rain, wind (on an already windy day) that gusted suddenly up to 70 mph, sudden waves that rose up over the bows and sides of boats. It was just chaos. Most people were surprised by how hard and how quickly it hit, and even the people who saw it didn't have time to drop sails. (And strong winds when the sails are up can snap a mast or spin a boat around on the surface of the water, or even flatten it down to the side....possibly even turtling it.) People were knocked overboard (2 people drowned), 4 boats sank, and over 50 were damaged.
(And then later that year we were hit by Hurricane Hugo! Quite the bad weather year that year!)
When I was living in Jordan, there was a thunder-snow-storm. About two inches of wet snow fell, mixed with rain, and the thunder was continuous, literally without a moment's break of silence for several hours.
One of the unforgettable high points, I was in Assam, India, when the monsoon started, and in the first really heavy rain, one could barely see across the road. As I watched, a well-soaked man went by riding on an elephant.
I've been outdoors (walking to work) in temperature of -45-F. In Kansas, working the early shift one morning, the overnight low was 90. Kayes, Mali, is said to be the hottest place in the world, and I passed through there in mid afternoon on a train that had no windows, but I have no idea what the temperature was. The highest dew point ever recorded in the world is 94, which occurs on the west shore of the Persian Gulf. I was there on a day when it must have been pretty close to that, and it is an indescribable feeling. My car had no AC. I saw dewpoints of 85 last summer here in south Texas, and it was nothing compared to the Arabian shore..
The most incredible sunset one afternoon, i was driving west into Albuquerque, and the sunset was so amazing, the radio stations were telling people go outside and look at it.
The densest fog Ive ever seen, in Vancouver and then again in Capetown, where only the first car at the crossing could see the red traffic lights, the second car back couldn't see the lights at all, and could only follow the lead of the car in front.
I crossed the Bay of Fundy, from Saint John New Brunswick to Nova Scotia, the the seas were running so high, you could hear the engines rev up when the ferry pitched forward and the screw came out of the water. That was exciting.
I saw a total eclipse of the sun in El Salvador, which is genuinely awesome, but not exactly weather.
However, the thunderstorms we got around 4 that afternoon were like nothing else I've ever seen around here since - lots of wind, very large hail, and lightning everywhere. Once the power came back on, the news over the course of the evening didn't actually seem that ominous, mainly (as it turned out) because the towns that had been hit directly had been hit so extremely hard that there was little or no communication out of them until very early the next morning.
The morning newscasts were a doozy. We get tornadoes with some regularity in NC, and they are usually small, brief, and usually don't do much or any significant damage. THIS outbreak was far, far different - the kind of thing you usually associate with Texas, Oklahoma or Kansas - the news the next day was of tornadoes that were 1 (or in a couple instances, 2) miles wide, left tracks 30,40, 50 miles long, and the towns that were directly hit were just about annihilated.
According the the NWS, one supercell thunderstorm (there were others) tracked from east of Anniston, Alabama to Virginia Beach - a distance of around 600 or 650 miles, and produced some kind of damage (large hail, funnel couds, tornadoes, microburst wind damage, or some combo of the above) in every county it passed through from Atlanta to Elizabeth City NC, including 13 tornadoes (10 of which were F3 or F4). This specific thunderstorm I recall attracted some scientific interest: it spawned two 2+ mile wide tornadoes that tore through opposite ends of Bennettsville, SC about 10 minutes apart - the two storms moved parallel for several miles. It was speculated that one of them may have been an F5 storm, but they both generated so much debris fallout, which - due to the size of both storms - covered wide areas between the two paths, that determining the magnitude of damage was nearly impossible to ascertain with any certainty - the meteorologist Ted Fujita speculated that the entire parent mesocyclone (low that spawned the tornado) may have come all the way to the surface. In Tatum, SC and Red Springs, NC, every single standing building inside the city limits was either damaged or completely destroyed.
I think the outbreak did something like $500,000,000 in damage in NC and SC, and that's without hitting any of the major cities in the states.
In the years since, there have been some very destructive tornadoes in NC - Raleigh was hit by a very powerful tornado in November 1988, Winston-Salem was struck by a similarly violent storm in May of 1989, and in 1998, the town of Stoneville (north of Greensboro) was very heavily damaged. As bad as those storms were, the 1984 outbreak was something far beyond them in its' scale. It left a very, very powerful impression.
On Feb 5, 2009 I was watching the weather on one of the Chicago stations around 7 A.M. They were talking about an anomaly that was occurring just Southwest of Aurora and heading Southeast. They said that this small weather pocket was producing extreme below zero temperatures of around minus 40 degrees.
At the time I was staying overnight in a small town of Norway Illinois and we were going to leave shortly. I told my wife that maybe I better start the car, as it looked as though the below zero weather was right in our path.
I think that when I started the car, the pocket had just reached our area. I looked at the thermometer on the car after I started it and it showed -39. Had I not seen the weather report I would not have believed the thermometer reading. Also, I think if I had waited another 15-20 minutes, the car would not have started, because I noticed that other people's cars would not start later.
I've told people that story and I think they think I was nuts. I've tried to find something on the internet about it, but have not had any luck.
On Feb 5, 2009 I was watching the weather on one of the Chicago stations around 7 A.M. They were talking about an anomaly that was occurring just Southwest of Aurora and heading Southeast. They said that this small weather pocket was producing extreme below zero temperatures of around minus 40 degrees.
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