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. raked northern Europe in 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.
- — 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.
- — Microbursts. A microburst is a sudden, violent downdraft of air that slams into the ground and blasts outward, downing planes and trees.
- — Sprites and upper-atmosphere lightning. High above thunderstorms, red sprites and blue jets flash upward toward space — lightning's mysterious mirror.
- — 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.
- — 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 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 2020 Iowa derecho. A powerful derecho flattened crops and cities across Iowa with hurricane-force winds.
- — 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. tore across Britain, Ireland and northwest Europe in 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.
