Weather Channel Worlds Weirdest Weather

in a wicked honey ass on real a giant cigar in the sky rain so heavy it sends eels swimming through the streets heels heels gonna and a sunset stops traffic in New York oh there it is there's always been weird weather but today thanks to the smartphone more and more of these crazy events are being captured on camera but things are going numb I think we should go today I'm going to be showing you some of the craziest clips yet and demonstrating the simple science that lies at the heart of these astonishing natural phenomena welcome to the world's weirdest weather here in the UK when it rains heavily we say it's raining cats and dogs outside and other countries have their own versions like it's raining chair legs always raining cobblers knives or pocket knives I've never heard anyone say it's raining spiders but maybe they should take a look at this Santo Antonio a Platina southern Brazil February 2013 Oh my sake Lawrence yeah the sky is full of spiders thousands of them swarming to form a cloud my second order in our area are the 10 million lucky it's in a Ratna phobes nightmare carnival voiceover today he hopes her the myth the freaked out on the curse think it's raining spiders but it's not in fact this cloud is a giant communal web apparently strung between power lines and its natural behavior for this species but don't get too comfortable because elsewhere spiders can and do get tangled up in the weather is people in Dallas Texas discover there were spider webs on the streetlights they're hanging off the trees when they were blowing out they were about 12 to 14 feet long it was absolutely crazy everything I mean everything was covered in spider webs North Texas is tangled in sticky spider webs they're stuck to lampposts cars and everything else they touch on a scale from one to ten of strangeness I would say this was about a twenty-one and how they got there is even stranger they hipster lifts on the wind many species of spiders actually use their webs to fly on the wind it's called ballooning spider ballooning is most often seen in young spiders and they use it as a way to spread out over long distances and find new habitats these special webs act like sails so it only takes a slight breeze to get the spiders airborne there they go by taking advantage of the weather the Texan spiders may have traveled hundreds of miles there's not just the wind that helps our eight-legged friends take off physicist Joe Dwyer explains how spiders can fly using lightning so the earth actually forms this electrical circuit called the global circuit it's energized by thunderstorms when a storm cloud forms positively and negatively charged particles within the cloud are separated this separation creates static electricity which can be discharged in the form of lightning the sum of this static electricity is not discharged it remains in the atmosphere even if there are no thunderstorms around there still large-scale electric fields are always there a spider's web can pick up a few of these charged particles just like in a magnet like charges repel each other because the particles on the web have the same charge of the particles in the air the web is pushed away and the spider flies now if you're very light like a little spider then it's possible if you have enough charge on you or on your little web to float or to rise in such electric fields Joe has prepared a simple demonstration to show how this works I've made some homemade spiders these are actually Halloween spiders I've taped pieces of mylar on the end to represent the webs so I'm going to take one put it on top of a Van de Graaff machine which will develop a big charts turn it on and away it goes so the charge in the web causes the web to rise up in the Earth's electric field taking the spider with it so next time you see a spider floating past on a windless day just remember you could be witnessing the power of the Earth's invisible electric field we've all heard of Movember the month when thousands of men across the UK grow moustache in order to raise money for charity but what I bet you didn't know was that sometimes the weather joins in to Patagonia Argentina a strange cloud drifts across the sky it looks like a 1970s disco - after about 30 seconds it disappears is a fleeting glimpse of one of the world's rarest clouds a mustache cloud cloud expert gavin Preta Pinney describes what makes these curious clouds so unique the stars class can be quite thin and roped like the upside-down Crescent appears to almost rotate because it forms within a vortex of air it's this vortex that makes moustache clouds so rare as the conditions must be absolutely perfect to create one a rising column of air a thermal encounters wind shear and this cause is the column of air to curl over and develop a vortex if you imagine a waterspout or a tornado that's a vertically orientated spinning column of air well in this case its horizontally aligned but where are the tornados vortex has a strong powerful rotation mustache clouds are much weaker appearing and disappearing within a matter of seconds they appear without fanfare the mustache curls around twirls and rotates and then just evaporates into the blue it's rare to get a photograph even rarer to get a video of them that makes this video from Patagonia truly exceptional a rare moving image of one of the rarest clouds in the world weird weather isn't always as obvious is a funny-shaped cloud or a freak snowstorm sometimes we only know it's happened because of the effect that it has on the natural world around us just like in our next story Qingdao China this once beautiful bay was selected to host the sailing events at the Beijing Olympics but over the last decade it's become more famous for its annual invasion by a sprawling green blob because extends to one kilometer you can't escape the slimy green intruder is a kind of algae called sea lettuce oh hi di papa yo yo yo let you go down that you wanted I shot my nose you know the sound you forgot chachi so what's all this got to do with the weather well in the springtime heavy rainfall washes fertilizer from the surrounding farmland and it all ends up in the sea where the algae go mad for it reproducing like crazy and filling the bay with floating goo in China this surf come turf is a harmless nuisance but on the other side of the globe and altogether different green tide is a deadly threat that water is green and not just a little green it's like pea soup green in 2011 satellite images show Lake Erie turning green with algae as record rainfall drains fertilizer into this North American landmark Zen Archer a lakeside local from Cleveland Ohio is a witness to this mega bloom I've lived in clione Cleveland all my life and I'd never seen anything like that in a lake before there is nothing but green yucky algae everywhere unlike the harmless sea lettuce in China Ohio had been invaded by a killer blue-green algae blue-green algae or cyanobacteria produces a toxin called micro cysteine that can irritate the skin and attack the liver causing illness and sometimes death Lake Erie is the shallowest of the Great Lakes this allows the Summer Sun to raise its temperature or easily than its deeper neighbors creating a cozy haven for amorous algae to get it on and in 2011 the conditions were simply perfect it had been rainy but also very very warm combined not a lot of wind or air resulted in this algae proliferating and filling the water this isn't a problem that's going to go away easily spring times are getting wetter and summers are getting hotter so as long as farmers keep using fertilizer the green goo will keep on coming back coming up next what happens when a mountainside dissolves and A Tale of Two Cities as the Sun Sox traffic in London and the wind wipes out a lakeside resort water isn't the only fluid that marches to the call of gravity sometimes the forces that hold together a landscape like this one can become unstable turning solid earth into a fluid mud in the blink of an eye and the results can be terrifying Bergin Austria August the 4th 2012 a violent torrent of mud Schatz's the piece of an Alpine Sun being heart ask Miya witnesses the terror suddenly there was this huge cell everything was shaking everybody was shouting outside that's much like it's a mudslide the summer of 2012 seeds weeks of baking hot weather that dries and hardens the ground in the mountains above then a sudden rainstorm breaks this material loose it tumbles downhill picking up debris until it's a river of mud and boulders as big as cars Perce on a rooftop being hard captures the enormous must like tearing through the town mudslides happen when fine particles of earth in a slope become unstable either by drying out too much like what happened in Austria or the opposite effect too much water which causes the mud to swell until it can't hold itself together any longer in both situations the greatest danger is to the people that live below because the flow the mud can pick up huge rocks and boulders on the way down and of course the steeper the slope the faster these rocking projectiles bounce down the mountain you can imagine two of these coming towards you at 50 miles an hour despite the danger being hard keeps filming it was like watching a movie but you are part of the movie the three-hour torrent leaves buildings coated with a thick layer of mud amazingly no one is seriously injured the mudslide triggered the Alpine town avalanche warning system giving the residents a precious few seconds to get out of the mud slide path the nature is to is the most powerful thing in the world and the human client is just a small spot in it it's not just the countryside that's threatened by weird weather big cities like London can suffer too in September 2013 the combination of a sunny day and architectural design made one part of the city a little too hot to handle it all begins as a typical summer's day but on one corner of the city it gets so hot a car starts to buckle and melt nearby a shop door Matt gets scores and a plastic window display bubbles and warps how can this happen in London where the city's highest recorded temperature is 38 degrees the answer lies with a newly built skyscraper known locally as the walkie talkie thanks to its distinctive curved shape what was happening in London was similar to what I'm doing here the magnifying glass is concentrating the sun's rays down to a single point on the paper and that's what was happening to the building it had a mirrored outside and a concave shape focusing the sun's rays down to a single point on the pavement unfortunately that was where the car is part Believe It or Not the temperature saw 290 degrees centigrade almost hot enough to boil water and definitely hot enough for a traditional British fire cooked in a less than traditional way to call things down the walkie-talkie or walkies scorchy as it's now been nicknamed is going to be given a giant sunshade making our fresco fry apps a thing of the past the effects of the solar death ray in London were short-lived but some weird weather can leave a lasting scar like our next story epic when Argentina in November 2011 curious sightseers photograph a ruined City recently emerged from beneath the waves of late epic when like an eerie Argentine Atlantis flashback to the 1960s and 70s and it's a very different picture epic when is a buzzing lakeside resort then in 1985 disaster strikes a sudden flood engulfs the town under more than nine litres of water the calls a single rogue wave that smashes through the towns flood defences like a tsunami we usually associate big waves with this sea and not legs but there is a simple explanation now we would have all done this before in the bath if you rock back and forth just the right speed you can create a way that travels the name of the bath and we all know what happens eventually all the water goes over the site well in Argentina it wasn't a bather that created this big wave but the wind it came from just the right angle it just the right speed and created a wave called SH wind driven safe waves can happen anywhere the conditions are right even in a swimming pool getting bigger and stronger with every surge the 1985 seis wave that destroyed epic when got so strong it smashed through the dam that protected the town with no defenses the wave surged through the town destroying it completely the authorities quickly realized it was easier to abandon the buildings and rebuild the protective dam so the houses were left knee-deep in water the residents found in new homes and the resort became a ghost town for nearly quarter of a century epic when is lost but since 2009 the town has been making a comeback inch by inch the waters have receded to reveal a haunting reminder of the strange and sometimes savage power of the weather most people see a cloud every single day of their lives if you live in the UK you get to see a fair few more but it's not often that you see a cloud that makes you stop instead and that's exactly what happened in the u.s. in 2012 Sea Isle City New Jersey June the 7th 2012 an ominous cloud looks like an advancing apocalypse it looks like a real bad boy in fact it's a rare roll cloud very unusual use clouds whenever and wherever roll clouds appear they certainly capture people's attention in a wicked honey ass on real cloud expert Gavin Preta penny explains how these ominous clouds form roll clouds look like a long tube of cloud which can stretch from one horizon to the other and it's quite low down in the sky now these clouds can form out ahead of a storm and as this cold air splays out it burrows beneath the warmer moister air that's ahead of the storm and as it burrows beneath that air it causes the air to rise and curl over so the air at the front of the roll cloud is rising the air at the back of it is sinking this rising cooling and falling cycle condenses water vapor into droplets of liquid water forming a visible cloud at the same time the advancing cold front bulldozes this cloud always creating an invisible wave of air that rolls the droplets up into a distinctive cigar like shape roll clouds might look dangerous but they're not at least not to us on the ground all about for anyone who ventures closer in October 2011 hang glider John Hesh finds out in a close encounter with one of these meteorological giants above the coast of Southern California that day was special because I I watched the cloud grow and develop and extend all the way up here and flew it for an hour and watched it dissipate and disappear the cloud doesn't hurt Hesh in fact it helps him to defy gravity when we fly a hang glider we're constantly sinking at 200 feet a minute but when the wind blows hard enough it counters that sync rate and we can fly around as long as the wind blows at the front edge of the roll cloud is an updraft so long as Heche stays inside it the rising air will keep him airborne it's a visible highway in the sky it defines the lifting area as close to being a bird as I know when they appear it's it's a magical afternoon magical maybe but judge it wrong and you could be in for a crash landing lifting air is something that gliders live for if they stay in front of the role than they are in consistently rising air the problem is they also can be rather dangerous because if you find yourself in the back of that wave of air that's where the air is sinking again if you don't know what you're doing when you are hang gliding around one of these clouds you could really get yourself into a lot of trouble still to come volcanic steam Devils eels hit the streets of New Zealand Neil's feel gutter and a tropical paradise turns white when it rains the natural thing for you and I to do is to run indoors and take shelter but I don't want slippery creature it takes it as an opportunity to come out of hiding and do it a city site Singh just take a look at our next story Masterton New Zealand March 2012 a quiet street becomes an outdoor aquarium have you ever hit the string your turn the street is swimming with slippery freshwater eels Kiwi local Jermaine Keira he captures the bizarre events on camera when I got here it was actually eels swimming in the gutter I look down to my left there was a couple down there there was a they were actually swimming on the footpath look at that eels on the road when we got out and actually saw that there was evil swimming around and there was a bit of a shock so first first time we've ever seen it in the streets how did a dozen eels slither into a suburban street it's down to an exceptionally heavy rainstorm I just remember the night before it actually it was raining at least 24 hours and non-stop it normally takes days of rain to flood the streets this badly so what was going on in New Zealand the answer three crucial ingredients the first ingredient that you need is a thundercloud the second thing that you need is for that thundercloud to be holding a vast amount of rape and finally you need that storm to unleash all the rainwater onto a small area in a short space of time a weather event like this in New Zealand is called a weather bomb when a weather bomb explodes it can trigger a flash flood so much water for so quickly it overwhelms the drainage system the drains overflow and water surges into the streets a really torrential flood can flush out anything and everything that floats including living creatures they actually came through the strain here the strain runs to a creek at the back of the house that my grandmother lives on most of us would be freaked out but Jermaine's grandma they're not scary they're lunch my Nana she was encouraging us to Girt thea catch them so she could eat them but she's old school so she was she was kena ever heaven lost feed / ill luckily for the eels Germaine has other ideas instead of cooking them he releases them back into the local Creek is the eels people torture you releasing them we didn't eat them so next time it rains don't forget your umbrella and fishing rod volcanoes are known as a force that shapes the landscape but they can also shape the weather and sometimes the results can be breathtaking the Kilauea volcano Hawaii as tourists was a lava pool into the Pacific a twisting vortex spirals up from the ocean it looks like a mini tornado but there's not a storm cloud in sight the killer where tornado is actually a steam devil a type of whirlwind that forms over warm water or damp Landers steam rises into cold air at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science creator Jennifer moss logan shows how this works what we have here is a box it has slits in the side to allow air in right here is a hot plate and on the hot plate or coins those coins represent the lava what I have here is a little tin of water this water represents the ocean water let's see what happens when we add the ocean water to the lava when water meets hot lava it turns to steam this starts to mix with the cold air around it more air is drawn in from the surrounding area creating a circular air current that spins the escaping steam that rising column of steam that's the vortex the air is rushing in and circulating around and causing that that beautiful vortex that is our steam devil Kilauea steam Devils grow so big and strong that it can often be mistaken for water spouts but there is an easy way to tell them apart water spouts form from cloud so if you follow them up you'll see the cloud that made them whereas steam devils are simply generated by warm damp air rising so if you see a twister out at sea and a cloud in sight the chances are it's a steam devil and you don't have to travel to Hawaii to see one steam Devils occasionally form over lakes and rivers like these ones dancing across the surface of a river in the US they form in the same way as the ones at Kilauea the only difference is here it's the Sun that heats the water and not hot lava steam Devils may be weird but they're also beautiful sometimes it's not the weather that's weird it's where it takes place just like our next story malua Bay Australia October the 14th 2013 it's a warm 30 degrees and residents are enjoying the beach but the next day they wake up to an unbelievable sight the bays Beach looks like it's being blanketed in snow my feet are going numb I think we should go a huge storm has struck overnight sending temperatures plummeting so what was going on well the first clue is what fell on the beach what look like snow was actually a thick layer of hail Hale is rain that freezes as it rises up inside a storm cloud storm clouds form when hot moist air surges upwards but along the coast cooler ocean temperatures mean the air is rarely hot enough to spawn a storm cloud so why does Manila Bay get negative by hail thunderstorms in Australia at that time of year aren't uncommon but what was very unusual is that the thunderstorm was so big with so much hail and so close to the sea it seemed incredibly unlikely something else must have triggered the weird weather and that something was raging further inland in surrounding New South Wales soaring temperatures spark and the 70 wildfires wildfires heat the air around them causing the air to rise very rapidly and in Australia all their air rising from the wildfires powered up the thunder clouds making them much much stronger and the convective currents helped them to produce a lot more hail and once the clouds cleared the fires they dumped this massive help right on the beach turning this Surfers Paradise into a winter wonderland coming up next on the world's weirdest weather the Sun stops traffic in New York Whirlpool's so big you can only see them from space they're very big they're very powerful you have no choice but to go with the flow the sculpting power of the wind and could this the earth's most powerful lightning weird weather can disrupt our lives a mudslide can wipe away a whole community and flash floods can bring a city to its knees but there's another type of weird weather that can stop traffic for very different reasons New York July de 13 2012 a crowd gathers near Grand Central Station to witness a bizarre natural wonder astrophysicist Jackie fatty explains what happens this place would be loved photographers pedestrians people that just sort of randomly stumbled upon all looking in the direction of New Jersey to the west on two days each year the Sun lines up exactly with Manhattan's dead straight east-west cross streets the result is a sunset that New Yorkers call Manhattanhenge so from this spot you just look straight west past Times Square the Sun dreamz perfectly you get a gorgeous view of the Sun right there kissing the grin as it says Manhattanhenge is named after our own Stonehenge and you don't have to be a druid to know the stones line up with the Rising Sun on the longest day of the year but while Stonehenge is solar alignment is an ancient mystery manhattan's is just a cosmic coincidence at nearby Rutgers University physicist David Mayu lo explains why here's our model of the setting and Rising Sun and this is our homemade model of Manhattan we all know that the Sun appears to rise in east and set in the West but it's actually more complex than that towards the summertime the Sun appears to move towards the north and towards the wintertime the Sun appears to move towards the south it changes its position along the horizon as the Sun moves north through the winter and spring it lines up perfectly with Manhattan's cross trees around the end of May then after the longest day of the year in June the sunset starts to move south setting in line with the grid around mid-july twice a year the setting and Rising Sun goes right down those east-west streets and that leads to a beautiful effect we call Manhattanhenge so if you find yourself in the Big Apple at the end of May or mid-july you could be lucky enough to see a sunset you'll never forget some weird weather events are so big that you need to stand a long way back to admire them and in the case of our next story a long long long way back the Cape of Good Hope South Africa December 26 2011 a satellite spot what looks at first like a hurricane at sea in fact it's a massive 90 mile wide whirlpool but oceanographers Simon Boxall photos like this have huge scientific importance when we first up started observing the oceans from space one of the very first features we looked at were these rings we knew they existed but seeing them from space was absolutely amazing the massive whirlpool has spun off the Agulhas current which runs down the east coast of africa and turns near the Cape of Good Hope they're very big they're very important but they're also very harmless because they're moving at maybe one or two miles an hour gentle giants like this can be seen in every ocean and a result of the strong winds and currents circulating around the world whirlpools are also created by underwater volcanoes and earthquakes but the most dangerous are found when a large mass of water is forced through a narrow gap these whirlpools very real I've certainly been caught in whirlpools in the past they can be quite scary if you do nothing about them and they do occur anywhere we get very strong flows the salt Stralman straight in Norway might look quite calm but in fact it has the world's strongest tidal current which creates the most powerful whirlpool on earth over 100 billion gallons of water squeezes through this narrow channel every six hours that's the equivalent of a hundred and sixty thousand Olympic sized swimming pools while in the Straits of Koree reckon it's the Rockies Scottish seabed that churns the onrushing tide into fierce and whirlpools especially the whirlpool even though it's tiny in comparison to is giant south african cousin when the winds blowing its roar can be heard over 10 miles away well calls tend to be fairly small Affairs very powerful you have no choice but to go with the flow so it's a good idea to treat whirlpools like the twisters of the Waterworld and get out of their way here in the UK we're lucky to have such dramatic coastlines like this these rocks had been eroded into these rugged shaped by the sea in other countries some even weirder rock structures exist and some hundreds of miles away from the nearest ocean what shapes them is the wind the white desert Egypt weird giant mushrooms appear to sprout from the ground in Turkey strange castles rise from the rock and an ocean of stripy ways flow across Arizona's desert they look for all the world like Contemporary Art but the only sculptor here is the weather these are pedestal rocks and they're made when the top layer of rock is harder than the rock below over time wind and sand wears away the weaker Rock leaving the harder Rock impossibly balanced on top the most famous pedestal rocks are the crazy castles of Cappadocia in Turkey over thousands of years locals have carved these weird-looking formations into homes forming a village of pabich like caves the pinnacles here are known as fairy chimneys or hoodoos and they were formed by ancient volcanoes spewing tough basalt rock over softer rock but sand and wind cut away to leave the hoodoos behind and some of them are huge the size of 14 story buildings with multiple homes carved out of them like a tower block and check out this psychedelic sea of stripes in Coconino County Arizona over time layers of sand lay down and solidify to form rock then the wind arose the rock revealing a candy-striped slice through history it's amazing just what the wind and sand can do last up on world's weirdest weather we're going out with a bang what you're about to witness could be earth's most powerful lightning Woodward Oklahoma May 27th 2001 two storm chasers are driving along a barren Highway when they spot this a lightning bolt that lasts for almost three seconds surging with a hundred times the power of an ordinary strike this is a Super Bowl I got it lightning expert Joe Dwyer explains more we've not about these super bolts for decades we're still not certain exactly what they are whether it's a an observational peculiarities or it's actually something to do with how lightning works super bolts appear to be on the rare end of the spectrum it's not quite clear how rare they are but they seem to be just on that right at the tail of what lightning can do super bolts may make up less than 1% of all lightning strikes however this extreme form of lightning can strike anytime anywhere and they've been witnessed in every corner of the world we can see distribution of little lightning a big lightning for most thunderstorms I would say that any thunderstorm could potentially make a very big Super Bowl some experts believe that Super Bowls may be related to a rare weather event called positive lightning lightning comes in two flavors positive and negative when you look at the real big stuff that all tends to be positive and so the inference is the Super Bowl also would be positive lightning negative lightning is the more common form and tends to come from the bottom of the storm cloud positive lightning is rarer and usually comes from the top or anvil of the cloud and it's more powerful than negative lightning while it's possible that super bolts can be either positive or negatively charged it is certain that they are the rarest and most powerful of all personally I find super bowls kind of scary if a Super Bowl hit a house I would not want to be in it so that's it for this episode but you never know when the next crazy weather event is going to happen so keep your cameras at the ready and next time it could be you capturing the world's weirdest weather next Monday Jamie's back with some new money-saving meals how about some frugal hangover noodles could have done with them yesterday that's at 8:30 new homes and business premises required filling Kirsty with location tomorrow night at eight o'clock the next up a starved and volatile camp turning on each other unmissable the island you

Channel: marc smith

Views: 520,743

Rating: 4.588685 out of 5

Keywords: Floods, Storms, Weather, Camera, Tsunami, Tornado, Tornado (Ship Class), Thunder, Lightning, Rain, Ever, Flood (Disaster Type), Weather Forecasting (Software Genre), The Weather Channel (TV Network), Storm (Disaster Type)

Id: 8d5m9_-_TiQ

Length: 46min 31sec (2791 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 01 2014