The Weirdest Weather Phenomena on Earth: From Fire Tornadoes to Ball Lightning to Raining Fish

I want to start by saying that raining fish is real. It has been documented across multiple countries over multiple centuries, people have collected the fish and eaten them, and scientists have a reasonably solid explanation for how it happens. This is not folklore or exaggeration. The weather on this planet is deeply strange. Most of it, when you look closely, has a scientific explanation. Some of it does not.

Fire Tornadoes

A fire tornado, also called a firenado or fire whirl, forms when the intense heat from a large wildfire creates a rising column of air. If that rising air starts to rotate, which it does under the right wind conditions, the column of fire spins into a vortex. The result is a tornado made of fire.

Fire tornadoes can reach temperatures above 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. They can throw burning debris at high speed for significant distances. The 2018 Carr Fire in California produced a fire tornado with winds estimated at 165 miles per hour, strong enough to damage tornado-resistant structures. It killed a firefighter who had responded to the blaze. The National Weather Service later classified it as an EF3 tornado on the standard tornado intensity scale. This marked the first time they had applied that classification to a fire-generated storm.

As climate change intensifies wildfires, fire tornadoes are appearing more frequently. Australia has documented multiple in recent years. California has seen several. They are no longer the extreme rarity they were in the 20th century. This is one of those facts that sits uncomfortably once you know it.

Raining Animals

The scientific explanation for animal rain involves waterspouts: tornado-like vortices that form over water rather than land. A waterspout develops a strong updraft that can pull water and everything in it, including fish, frogs, and small aquatic creatures, up into the storm system. The storm then carries this cargo over land. When the vortex loses energy, everything falls.

The result is raining fish. Or raining frogs. Or, in one documented 2022 case, raining fish in Texarkana, Texas, which prompted the city government to post on social media clarifying that yes, this had actually happened, and no, it was not a joke.

In Yoro, Honduras, residents have documented fish falls during storms every year between May and July for over 200 years. The phenomenon is called Lluvia de Peces, the Rain of Fish. The fish that fall are small, often pale-colored, and not native to any surface water in the immediate area. Scientists have proposed that they come from underground rivers that overflow during heavy rainfall, pushing fish to the surface just as the storm’s updrafts pick them up. Yoro hosts an annual festival celebrating this, which strikes me as the correct response to your town regularly receiving fish from the sky.

The earliest documented report in the United States was in Kansas City in 1873, when a tornado dropped frogs on the city. The Scientific American covered it at the time. In 1994, about 110 pounds of fish rained on a Sri Lankan village, which the BBC reported with the additional note that the fish were edible, as if this were the relevant detail.

Ball Lightning

Ball lightning is the phenomenon that keeps being inconvenient for physics. People have reported glowing spherical orbs of light, ranging from golf ball to soccer ball size, floating slowly through the air during or after thunderstorms, passing through walls, making no sound, emitting no heat, and then either fading quietly or exploding with a pop.

Ball lightning shows up in credible eyewitness accounts going back centuries. Pilots have reported it in aircraft cockpits. Multiple independent witnesses have observed the same ball lightning event simultaneously. A 14th-century Chinese manuscript describes it. The phenomenon appears across dozens of cultures in different eras with consistent characteristics.

The problem is that science cannot reliably explain it or reproduce it in a laboratory. The prevailing hypothesis involves a form of stable plasma, held together briefly by its own magnetic field following a lightning strike. However, plasma should dissipate extremely quickly under normal atmospheric conditions, and ball lightning reportedly lasts anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes. Several alternative theories exist, including microwave radiation from lightning interacting with soil, vaporized silicon forming luminous structures, and nuclear effects. None of them fully accounts for all documented observations.

In 2012, Chinese researchers accidentally captured ball lightning on spectroscopic video during a storm. The data supported a silicon plasma hypothesis. It did not fully explain all reported characteristics. Ball lightning is still not understood well enough to reproduce under controlled conditions. In a world where science has explained almost every common atmospheric phenomenon, this is a genuinely strange gap.

Thundersnow

Thundersnow is exactly what it sounds like: a thunderstorm occurring simultaneously with heavy snowfall. It is rare, dramatic, and considerably more startling than either phenomenon alone.

Standard thunderstorms form from unstable warm, moist air. Snow typically forms in cold, stable atmospheric conditions. Thundersnow occurs in a narrow zone where these two conditions coexist, usually at the edge of a powerful storm system. The Great Lakes region produces it most reliably in the United States, where cold air masses interact with warm lake water, creating the instability that both generates heavy snow and enables lightning.

The sound of thunder during a snowstorm is significantly different from during a rainstorm. Snow absorbs and muffles sound, so thunder during thundersnow tends to be shorter and more muted than during standard electrical storms. The lightning, however, is just as real. Storm chasers and meteorologists describe the experience of thundersnow as deeply disorienting, partly because of the visual of lightning against a snow-filled sky and partly because nothing in everyday experience prepares you for the combination.

Red Rain

In 2001, red rain fell on the Indian state of Kerala for two months. The rainwater appeared colored, ranging from light pink to deep red. Residents were alarmed. Scientists investigated.

The explanation turned out to be neither supernatural nor extraterrestrial, though one researcher did propose an alien origin that received considerable attention. The most famous occurrences have been recorded in India, Europe, and the Middle East, where locals once feared it was a sign of the apocalypse. The Kerala red rain, however, came from spores. A meteor or comet fragment is believed to have exploded in the upper atmosphere over Kerala, scattering biological material that later fell with rain. The spores were identified as belonging to a species of algae native to nearby trees. The meteor impact had presumably dispersed them high enough to be carried by atmospheric circulation before settling back down in the rain.

Red rain has also occurred in Europe when Saharan dust clouds mix with precipitation, producing reddish or orange-tinted rain. Spain and Portugal report this with some regularity. The Saharan dust is carried north by the same pressure systems that drive weather across the Mediterranean.