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By Luis Gustavo. See how we research and review our content.
On the evening of July 26, 2018, a column of flame near Redding, California, spun with wind speeds that a damage survey rated as equal to a strong tornado. It lasted about half an hour. Weather does not need a special-effects studio to produce scenes like that, and the five phenomena below are all documented.
Some are fully explained and some are still argued over. For each one, the notes separate what has been measured from what remains a hypothesis, so you can tell a mechanism from a guess.
1. Volcanic lightning is a real thing
When a volcano throws ash into the sky, the grains rub and collide, and the friction builds up static charge much as it does inside an ordinary thundercloud. That process, called triboelectric charging, is considered a major source of the sparks. In tall plumes that climb above the freezing level, ice crystals add a second charging route. Lightning was reported in the 2010 Eyjafjallajökull eruption in Iceland, among many others.
Two studies from 2016 show the range. At Japan’s Sakurajima, lightning near the ground tracked friction in thick ash clouds. At Chile’s Calbuco in 2015, a strike appeared about 100 kilometers from the volcano, roughly 20 kilometers up, where scientists think ice had formed at the top of the thinning cloud. The nickname “dirty thunderstorm” points to the ash doing the work that raindrops and hail do in normal storms.
2. Animal rain is a documented phenomenon
Reports go back centuries: fish near Chaeronea in the 4th century BC, frogs in Tournai, Belgium, in 1625, toads near Lille, France, in 1794, and a fish fall in Lajamanu, Australia, in February 2010. The leading hypothesis is that tornadic waterspouts lift small animals and carry them for miles, but scientists have never actually watched it happen.
The idea has weak points. A waterspout does not explain why every animal in an event is the same species, and real waterspouts tend to fling objects outward rather than draw them upward. In many cases the likelier story is that no animals fell at all: wind or a flood drove them into the open. Birds are another factor, since storms can kill or stun flocks, and a bird may drop its prey.
3. There are clouds shaped like “flying saucers”
Lenticular clouds are smooth, stationary, lens-shaped clouds, and the name comes from a Latin word for lentil-shaped. They form when moist, stable air flows over mountains and sets up standing waves on the downwind side. Where the crest of a wave cools below the dew point, vapor condenses into cloud, and as wind keeps feeding the wave the cloud reforms in the same place, which is why it looks parked in the sky.
They can sit as high as about 12,000 meters. Their saucer outline has led people to mistake them for UFOs. For powered aircraft the clouds are best avoided, because turbulence and sinking air lurk at the trailing edge.
4. Some places get “fire tornadoes”
The Carr Fire vortex of July 26, 2018 in Redding is the best-documented example. It stayed on the ground for about 30 minutes, with winds estimated above 143 mph (230 km/h), equal to an EF3 tornado, and four people died. The National Weather Service lists it officially as a fire whirl, and it is described as the strongest in California history.
Researchers later published a case study in Geophysical Research Letters. It linked the vortex to a fire-generated storm cloud, a pyrocumulonimbus that reached about 39,000 feet. The smoke plume rose from roughly four to eight miles within 15 minutes, a process the authors likened to the growth of an ordinary thunderstorm. Extremely dry fuels, heat and terrain-channeled winds also contributed.
5. The “Midnight Sun” really happens in some regions
The cause is Earth’s axial tilt, about 23.4 degrees. During summer in the hemisphere tilted toward the Sun, places north of the Arctic Circle, or south of the Antarctic Circle in the opposite season, do not see the Sun set. Refraction and the Sun’s disk mean it can stay visible up to about one degree beyond those circles.
The length depends on latitude. In Tromsø, Norway, it runs from late May to mid-July, and Svalbard has it from about 19 April to 23 August. Utqiagvik, Alaska, has a polar day lasting roughly 84 days, and at the North Pole the Sun stays up from about 18 March to 24 September.
Why glider pilots chase lenticular clouds
What annoys engine-powered pilots delights glider pilots. The rising air on the front edge of the wave, called wave lift, is often smooth and strong, and it has enabled distance flights over 3,000 kilometers and altitudes above 22,000 meters.
Yoro’s yearly fish, and the town that throws a festival for them
In Yoro, Honduras, fish appear on the ground after the first big storms of the mid-year rainy season, and since 1998 the town has marked it with an annual Festival de Lluvia de Peces. Scientists doubt the fish fall from the sky, because the nearest sea, the Atlantic, is about 72 km away. One proposed explanation is that freshwater fish slip from a nearby river into an underground water system, and heavy rain flushes them out.
Other reads that fit this theme: dinosaur facts and facts about the oceans. Eruptions are covered in 5 volcano facts, big storms in hurricane facts, and another polar light show in facts about the northern lights.
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A lens-shaped cloud that never moves, a fish that may never have fallen: the more spectacular the weather story, the more it pays to ask what was actually measured.