Freak Weather Incidents
If your weather forecaster said it would rain frogs you might think they had gone mad. But rains of fish or frogs or other animals have been reported for centuries. As recently as August 8, 2000 a shower of dead but still fresh sprats rained down on the fishing port of Great Yarmouth, in Norfolk, England, after a thunderstorm. The fish shower would have been caused by a small tornado out to sea, known as a waterspout, which trawls up water and any fish near the surface. When the tornado touches the land it begins to lose energy and its contents are thrown to the ground.
From Biblical tales of Egyptian storms to British towns, all kinds of places have suddenly found themselves covered with amphibians falling from the sky. In June 1997 it rained toads in the town of Villa Angel Flores in Mexico. A small tornado whirled up a cluster of toads from a local body of water Saturday night and dropped them over the town. Motorists reported them dropping from the sky around 11 p.m. In March 1998, it rained frogs in Croydon, England. A woman reported the sudden appearance of hundreds of dead frogs in her and her neighbours' gardens when there was no known pond or lake in the immediate vicinity?
Can they kill? Over the years all sorts of animals and plants have showered down during thunderstorms, possibly sucked up from rivers and lakes by tornadoes (or their watery equivalents - waterspouts) into thunderclouds and then dumped miles away in heavy rain. Tornadoes pick up anything they find in their path but some scientists think that many animals of the same type or size may fall during a storm because as the wind travels, heavier items will fall first. Then when the smaller items drop from the tornado, things that tend to weigh the same will drop together.
Dozens of dead birds have occasionally been seen plummeting out of the sky, sometimes partly frozen. These poor animals were probably swept up high in the powerful updrafts of a thundercloud, then frozen like hailstones before gravity took over. Even stranger, a report in a 1930 issue of the magazine Nature tells us about a severe hailstorm in Vicksburg, U.S.A. where a gopher turtle, 6 inches by 8 inches, and entirely encased in ice, fell with the hail.
Other objects can rain out of the sky. In July 4, 1995 people in Keokuk, Iowa found soft drink cans that a tornado had lifted from the Double Cola Bottling Plant in Moberly and dropped about 150 miles north. Perhaps most bizarre are the ‘rains of blood' which have been reported all over the world ever since biblical times. An important clue to their cause came in July 1968 in southern England, when a shower coated everything in red gritty dust. It was fine sand blown up from the Sahara and carried over a thousand miles inside a massive high pressure system before falling in a rain shower. In some dry areas, ‘dust devils' (dust storms) are very common with debris falling out of the sky.
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20-07-2007, 03:08 PM
