Lightning & Freak Storms
The sky at its strangest, killer lightning, supercells, derechos, ball lightning and the freak storms that defied the forecast.
Part of Natural Disasters
43 moments in this segment.
- - The Brescia lightning disaster. Lightning struck a church vault storing gunpowder in Brescia, Italy, in 1769, and the explosion destroyed a sixth of the city.
- - The Great Storm of 1987. A freak extratropical storm battered southern England in 1987, felling 15 million trees overnight.
- - The storms Lothar and Martin. Two ferocious windstorms tore across France and central Europe after Christmas 1999, killing 140.
- - Windstorm Kyrill. 2007 with hurricane-force gusts, shutting down whole countries.
- - Blood rain and freak precipitation. History records rains of blood, fish and frogs, real phenomena caused by dust, waterspouts and updrafts lofting matter into the clouds.
- - The 1908 Tunguska event. A meteor air-burst flattened 2,000 square km of Siberian forest, the largest impact event in recorded history, though no crater was found.
- - The 2012 Mid-Atlantic derecho. A derecho, a vast, fast wall of straight-line wind, raced from the Midwest to the Atlantic, leaving millions without power.
- - Thundersnow. A rare phenomenon where a snowstorm produces lightning and thunder, most often in intense winter blizzards.
- - Deadly lightning in Bangladesh. Bangladesh suffers some of the world's deadliest lightning; a single day in 2016 killed dozens of farmers in the fields.
- - Thunderstorm asthma. A freak 2016 Melbourne storm burst pollen into breathable fragments, triggering a wave of asthma that killed 10.
- - The volcanoes that make lightning. Ash-charged eruptions from Anak Krakatau to Sakurajima spit continuous lightning through their plumes.
- - Volcanic lightning. Ash plumes generate their own storms, strobing volcanic lightning through columns of smoke and ash.
- - Seiches - the standing waves. Wind and pressure can set a whole lake or bay sloshing back and forth in a 'seiche', flooding one shore then the other.
- - Bomb cyclones. When a storm's pressure crashes fast enough it 'bombs out', an explosive cyclogenesis that whips up blizzards and floods.
- - Snow in the Sahara. In a genuine freak of weather, snow occasionally dusts the dunes of the Algerian Sahara at Aïn Séfra.
- - Gustnadoes and landspouts. Weak, short-lived whirlwinds spin up along storm gust fronts, tornado-like but born from a different mechanism.
- - Microbursts. A microburst is a sudden, violent downdraft of air that slams into the ground and blasts outward, downing planes and trees.
- - Fire whirls (fire tornadoes). Intense wildfires can spin up 'fire whirls' or true fire tornadoes, rotating columns of flame, like the deadly 2018 Carr Fire vortex.
- - Heat bursts. A rare nighttime 'heat burst' can send temperatures spiking and winds roaring as a dying storm collapses.
- - Shelf clouds and roll clouds. An advancing storm's shelf cloud or a rolling 'morning glory' cloud makes some of the most dramatic skies on Earth.
- - The lightning capital of the world. Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela and the Congo basin see more lightning than anywhere else on the planet.
- - Sprites and upper-atmosphere lightning. High above thunderstorms, red sprites and blue jets flash upward toward space, lightning's mysterious mirror.
- - Dust devils. Whirlwinds of dust spin up on hot, dry days worldwide, usually harmless but sometimes strong enough to cause damage.
- - Supercell mothership storms. The rotating 'mothership' supercells of the Great Plains are among the most spectacular and dangerous storm structures on Earth.
- - Superbolts and megaflashes. Some lightning 'megaflashes' stretch hundreds of kilometres, and rare 'superbolts' are thousands of times brighter than normal.
- - Straight-line winds and 'plow winds'. Not every wind disaster is a tornado, straight-line downbursts flatten forests and towns just as violently.
- - Anvil crawlers and spider lightning. The vast, branching lightning that crawls along the underside of a storm's anvil is among the sky's great spectacles.
- - The 2020 Iowa derecho. A powerful derecho flattened crops and cities across Iowa with hurricane-force winds.
- - The 2020 Midwest derecho. A derecho, a vast, fast wall of straight-line winds, tore across the U.S. Midwest at up to 200 km/h, flattening Iowa's corn crop.
- - The Loyalton fire tornado. A wildfire near Loyalton, California, spun up a fire tornado so strong the weather service issued a tornado warning.
- - Medicanes - Mediterranean hurricanes. The Mediterranean occasionally spins up rare hurricane-like storms called 'medicanes', such as Ianos in 2020.
- - The 1993 Storm of the Century. A colossal cyclone struck the entire U.S. East Coast with blizzards, tornadoes and record low pressure, affecting 40% of Americans.
- - Freezing rain and ice disasters. Freezing rain glazes everything in ice, snapping power lines and trees across whole regions in silent, crushing storms.
- - The mothership supercell. Rotating 'mothership' supercells, vast wall-like storm structures over the Great Plains, are among the most awesome sights in weather.
- - Snow squalls. Sudden, blinding bursts of heavy snow and wind cause instant whiteouts and deadly highway pile-ups.
- - Storm Eunice. 2022 with record gusts.
- - The 1980 More Trees derecho. A powerful derecho raced across the U.S. in 1980, one of the events that defined the phenomenon.
- - Green skies and severe storms. When a storm turns the sky an eerie green, it often signals a violent hailstorm or derecho, as over South Dakota in 2022.
- - Volcanic and storm lightning shows. Some of the most intense lightning storms on Earth strobe continuously through supercells and volcanic ash clouds.
- - The 2024 tornado super-season. The spring of 2024 brought one of the most active severe-storm seasons on record across the U.S.
- - The Catatumbo lightning. Where Venezuela's Catatumbo River meets Lake Maracaibo, lightning storms rage up to 300 nights a year, the most electric place on Earth.
- - Lightning and the skyscraper. Tall towers like the Empire State Building are struck by lightning dozens of times a year, filmed in spectacular strikes.
- - Ball lightning - the freak phenomenon. For centuries, witnesses have reported glowing balls of light drifting through storms, a rare, still-unexplained atmospheric mystery.
