Has anyone here ever seen a tornado IRL?

["couldbecousin"]

I do want to see one, but DD's post made me think.

  Me too!  Imagine coming upon one in the middle of the road like that, without warning!   

I still want to see one.

    Me too.  I've had so many vivid dreams about seeing them.  Maybe one day ... 

[Lestat]

That miniature tornado I once saw was right in the middle of the road, while traveling down it by car.

Not powerful enough to do any damage to the vehicle, or bounce it around etc. etc.

[DirtDawg]

I do want to see one, but DD's post made me think.

Think?

Do you mean that watching a car go straight up in to a tornado would be interesting?
 

Well, it was and it was also very disturbing. To see that the inhabitants of that car had survived was even more interesting. I can only imagine the STORY they had to tell.
What did they see inside that tornado?

We had like a whipped topping of rocks and wind-driven dirt taking off the whole side of our fancy-assed bus painting in about ten seconds, but those people were vertical while we were just having to deal with everything inside the bus coming off the wall (literally cabinets that were a part of the living space became detached from the walls of the bus and the fucking coffee pot hit me in the back of the head after bouncing off the windshield- yes, glass bouncing off of hardened glass without breaking - WTF! -  and then bouncing off the bulkhead behind the driver seat - but, I was already well on my way to being disturbed before I was scalded by hot coffee down my back - lol.) and every passenger being thrown out of their beds.

Funniest thing was that "the Boss" was not awake when he tried to rip me a new asshole for driving stupid and slamming on the brakes, etc. Some other driver had hit us in the rear, next to his bed! He was already freaked, before he knew what had happened.
 
Honestly, that bus could NOT have stopped so suddenly if I had locked up all fourteen tires as hard as the bus could stop.

I just said, "Shut up and look outside for a minute! We just ran into a tornado. SEE, there it goes!"  And as quickly as it had come, it was gone.
 
The tornado just spit us out and that eighty thousand pound bus stopped in about one hundred feet (due to hitting a masssive pressure wave that was thousands (or maybe hundreds of thousands - you know science does not have a clue about what goes on inside of a tornado. They think they are getting close, but then shit just not make sense, sometimes.) of times more powerful than a massive bus traveling at forty miles per hour) and I could not have stopped that bus at that speed in less than eight or nine hundred feet just using its brakes. (I know I am repeating myself, but try to grasp this incredible phenomenon)

I suppose it is not really funny, but finding a way to deal with trauma often includes humor and denial.  But to be real, some of us could seriously have died that day, but we did not and the humor is all that is left to make sense of it all.

Just to make sure you understand the kind of crazy assed things that can occur when a tornado is in the area, I want to re-iterate about the wimpy glass coffee pot flying (about twenty feet through the air and the base of the coffee pot going another direction) at great speed and hitting the front windshield (small mass of glass flying against a very BIG tempered glass panel), then glancing off and again not breaking, but bouncing off the back wall of the cockpit bulkhead, still not breaking, but dousing me and my "friend" with hot coffee, still not breaking. I and one other witnessed the pot do what it did and we were all as astonished after we had re-gained our wits.

Tornadoes create crazy instances of almost unbelievable events. Then people die and shit. Fortunately, no one died that day.

Thankfully, since it was very early in the morning and the pot had not broken, we made more coffee and began to recover. We talked about the whole shit for about four days.

[DirtDawg]

I do want to see one, but DD's post made me think.

  Me too!  Imagine coming upon one in the middle of the road like that, without warning!   

I still want to see one.

    Me too.  I've had so many vivid dreams about seeing them.  Maybe one day ... 

Just make sure that you have a safe place to be once it gets close.

I have never had to live through one that caused me to take shelter under a bridge or in a drainage ditch or something, but a "friend" of mine did and he lost his hearing over the following few days. His tympanic membranes had both been ruptured beyond repair. He was "safely" taking cover under a huge interstate bridge. He survived, but his hearing did not.

[odeon]

I would not want to be anywhere that close to one. But there is something about them that makes me want to see one.

It's pretty much the same with lightning. If there is a thunderstorm I want to see it, but I sure as hell don't want to be hit by it.

[DirtDawg]

I would not want to be anywhere that close to one. But there is something about them that makes me want to see one.

It's pretty much the same with lightning. If there is a thunderstorm I want to see it, but I sure as hell don't want to be hit by it.

So, what now, are we talking about lightning?
I used to follow what we called thunderstorms (in my incredibly unprepared youth), thinking that thunder and maybe some hail was the worst of it.

Realize, I use to live where sea level was about twenty feet below where we lived. The clouds that brought massive thunder storms racing across the Gulf Of Mexico had "bottoms" that were about a hundred or two hundred feet or so above our heads.

Chasing a thunder storm one time (you have to understand that, since the huge clouds are so low and the power and electrical pressure is about the same as clouds that are five or six miles high (which these storms typically are as well) and extend over forty or fifty thousand feet into the atmosphere, the potential energy between the clouds and the ground is about the same, BUT ...) we were about a football field away when we saw a lightning bolt only about a hundred or so feet high, but it was larger around (and it had texture that we could see and large dark spots that seemed to be sucking energy in streamers from the rest of the bolt and brilliant spots that had fingers that radiated outward) than our car was long, easily more than twenty (maybe more) or so feet in diameter.

BUT, instead of just going like, "blip" from several thousand feet up in the air and being done with its bad self in less than a hundredth of a second or so, like they do around here and being over and done in an instant, this wicked awesome bastard of a wicked scary lightning bolt was not only huge in diameter and extremely short in stature, it lasted over two seconds while it vaporized a scary amount of soil (we went back the next day to judge this for ourselves and there was no problem finding where the bolt hit the ground and left a hole) where it hit.

Needless to say my storm chasing days were rapidly coming to an end.  Seeing the hole that that one particular bolt of lightning burned into the sandy ground, gathering a few pieces of melted finger-like glass where the lightning had penetrated the soil resolved a great deal of my curiosity about thunder storms in short order.

Do you remember me mentioning ( go back to about my second year here) that I was almost struck by a lightning bolt right in my own back yard, here in Indiana. I began to feel like I was having goose bumps all over and I jumped up and about that time a small bolt hit near my car where I was sitting. It knocked the hell out of me and I was sore for days, but it did not actually touch me. I was just stunned by the close proximity and the power of it. That was just a tiny little bolt and it did not melt any soil when it hit.

Other than spending a lot of time trying to photograph lightning, that is my experience. Have some amazing lightning slides, though. I always used slide film in those days. It was just better film.

[odeon]

Thunderstorms, tornadoes, they fascinate me. All that raw and unpredictable power.

We're surrounded by rocky hills with plenty of trees, which means that thunderstorms are almost never directly above us. They instead seek out the highest points and strike there, which means that I basically have a front row seat to the spectacle.

Our geography also means that even though small tornadoes will sometimes form on the Swedish west coast, they'll most likely not find their way here.

[Icequeen]

Thunderstorms, tornadoes, they fascinate me. All that raw and unpredictable power.

We're surrounded by rocky hills with plenty of trees, which means that thunderstorms are almost never directly above us. They instead seek out the highest points and strike there, which means that I basically have a front row seat to the spectacle.

Our geography also means that even though small tornadoes will sometimes form on the Swedish west coast, they'll most likely not find their way here.

Same here.

Have two trees here still bearing the scars from lightening strikes...was witness to both.

['andersom']

Once lighting hit the lightning rod of a church I was passing. I could feel the electrical tingle all over my body.

And, when I was in last class of primary school, we were on an evening walk event with our class. A thunderstorm came up. A big bolt of lightning came from the skies, right above us, condensed in a ball, and then split into three, all going away from us in different directions. The air-pressure it caused was that huge that our whole class was smitten to the ground. It happened three times after another. The moment we were on our feet again, we were back on the pavement. It was an eventful night.

I still love watching at a thunderstorm, but, I do respect what it can do.

[Icequeen]

Once lighting hit the lightning rod of a church I was passing. I could feel the electrical tingle all over my body.

And, when I was in last class of primary school, we were on an evening walk event with our class. A thunderstorm came up. A big bolt of lightning came from the skies, right above us, condensed in a ball, and then split into three, all going away from us in different directions. The air-pressure it caused was that huge that our whole class was smitten to the ground. It happened three times after another. The moment we were on our feet again, we were back on the pavement. It was an eventful night.

I still love watching at a thunderstorm, but, I do respect what it can do.

My uncle was knocked over like that when he was a kid and got a bit of jolt too. His friends and him were working out in the field and took cover from the storm under a tree. They picked the wrong tree. Guess it knocked the whole bunch of them down.

[odeon]

There's been quite a few thunderstorms this summer. There was one just the other day that went on for hours, on and off, circling us. Amazing stuff.

[Charlotte Quin]

We've had some waterspouts off the coast but I never witnessed them.

[Icequeen]

Would like to see one of those too, just not from a boat.

I think it was last year they had two over Lake Michigan.

[Lestat]

A 20 foot in diameter lightening bolt? christ, that would have made a squishy, partially vitrified, crunchy charred mess if it hit someone.

Its astonishing that there are ever survivors of one, let alone multiple strikes, seeing as how the energies involved are rated at megavolts and kiloamperes of current when you only need a fraction of 1 amp to kill a human being, if its running at a few hundred volts. And thats not to mention that its coming down in a bolt of superheated plasma carrying an absolutely insane amount of kinetic energy. But there you go, with survivors, and even those unlucky sons of bitches that have been struck by 6-7 thunderbolts and got up again to tell the tale.

Apparently one guy, that got hit over and over, and over again actually ended up comitting suicide. I guess he got fed up of being thor's target practice range and offed it, being fed up of getting the deity-scale smackdown put on him from on high.

Now hows THAT for irony:P

Hyke, you mean it was ball lightening you saw? quite a curious, and rare phenomenon, I'd love to see it sometime. Those kinds of spherical plasmoids are easy to generate, using for example, microwave radiation, but its intriguing the way that proper ball lightening can hang around for as long as it sometimes does, moving around before exploding. I'd be interested to know how the sort-of self-sustaining effect occurs without continuous energy input and possibly, magnetic confinement, if it were known, I bet it would have implications for fusion power research.

[DirtDawg]

Thunderstorms, tornadoes, they fascinate me. All that raw and unpredictable power.

We're surrounded by rocky hills with plenty of trees, which means that thunderstorms are almost never directly above us. They instead seek out the highest points and strike there, which means that I basically have a front row seat to the spectacle.

Our geography also means that even though small tornadoes will sometimes form on the Swedish west coast, they'll most likely not find their way here.

Those types of storm always intrigued have me as well.

Where I grew up it was the Rio Grande Valley. Now admittedly, the mighty Rio Grande is a bit shy of late, but if you look at the geology of the area, there was SOME MIGHTY RIVER that used to exist that created a four hundred mile wide delta of nearly perfectly flat flood water silt and associated river deposits.

Being right near the mouth of this ancient Mighty Rio Grande river, our land was laser flat for miles and miles and just above sea level for quite a few of those miles as the river dumped its silt from high up in the Rocky Mountains and created this super flat landscape. That is why we have so many Gulf storms race inland and never reach the upper atmosphere, but do their incredibly massive business from just a few hundred feet off the ground.

Remember the Gulf Of Mexico is typically in the upper eighties Fahrenheit in surface temperature for the first few feet and very volatile as far as instantaneous weather is concerned. It is exposed to subtropical sunshine AND it is a captive volume of water for the most part. Check the science if this seems like a stretch of actuality.