You don’t have to be a storm chaser to appreciate places with freaky weather. Photographers love freaky weather and as a traveler, freaky weather is just all part of the experience of new places. It seems also that thanks to Global Warming and changes in the world’s weather patterns, there are more places with freaky weather popping up in unexpected locations, along with places that have always been that way.
1 Lausanne, Switzerland
This is a great place for thunder and hail. The storms come in off the Alps and hit this lovely little area like a sledgehammer. It is one of those places with freaky weather that is actually quite scary because of the dark swirling clouds and massive cracks of thunder that set off car alarms. The storms roll in quickly and the skies are sometimes very dark and moving, almost as if it were the end of the world.
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2 Tampa Bay, Florida, USA
Florida is known for its hurricanes and storms, and even gets tourists arrive in May and October just for the crazy weather. Tampa is the lightning capital of the USA and watching the lighting storms over the sea is actually really exciting and quite a spectacle. Plus, they can happen at any time, so you just have to go there, stay in a hotel near the sea and await the show.
3 Southwest Sweden
Historically, this was never really one of those places with freaky weather, but global warming has changed this area in recent times. Southwest Sweden now experiences massive and frequent storms. The melting ice caps have changed the wind directions so that violent and blizzards are coming from the mountains and battering the region. If you like snowstorms and downed power lines, you are going to love it here.
4 The Namib Desert, Namibia
The Namib Desert experiences some of the worst sandstorms on the African continent. The storms here are made up of just red sand. Some of the storms swirl around and look pretty, and others create a wall of sand that takes all of the paint off of your cars and scratches up your windscreen so that it looks foggy. Dense fog sometimes appears too, rolling in off the so called Skeleton Coast, which looks very creepy over the desert dunes and depressions.
5 Barcelona, Spain
Images of sun washed beaches and a café street culture probably come to mind when you think of Barcelona and not that it’s one of the places with freaky weather. Barcelona is a very weird place climatically speaking because it a little like where three triangles of weather meet. This means that after the summer sun has gone, you get all sorts of weird and unexpected weather conditions. A flash flood will come without a hint, or hail will appear sometimes in rock form. Sometimes there are massive storms with thunder and lightning, and sometimes there are dust storms or waterspouts that come out of nowhere. During September and November is when the conditions are the most extreme.
6 Sydney, Australia
This is another of the places you normally associate with picture postcard vacation weather, but in the city that is commonly mistaken for Australia’s capital, you may just see some very nasty hailstorms. Sydney has between five and ten of them every year between October and April. They often go hand-in-hand with massive storms, and the hail has been known to reach the size of tennis balls.
7 Bangkok, Thailand
In the Thai capital and surrounding area you can experience monsoons, tsunamis, and cyclones. Thankfully, although regular, they are reasonably mild. The monsoons between June and October deliver some of the world’s fastest falling rain. The nearby earth movements (tectonic plates) are also what cause the tsunamis, and cyclones are common because of the frequently shifting weather conditions.
8 The Great Plains, North America
Tornado Alley is a place that lives up to its name. There are small and large tornadoes there that simply have nothing to slow them down or stop them from forming, so they roll around the plains. It is possible to see small cute ones that you can drive your car through (if you like dents in your car), and you can see big killer ones. Over five hundred people were killed on the Great Plains by Tornados in the year 2011, which is the year it broke its own record for being the deadliest-concentrated tornado area in the world.
9 Iceland
Iceland is one of those places with freaky weather that is a climate geek’s heaven on Earth. The Land of Ice and Fire has extreme seasons with winters colder than cold and landscapes covered in snow and ice, and mild summers when the island turns remarkably green. Unlike the other extreme climatic conditions which can be dangerous, the jewel in Iceland’s weather crown is the spectacular Northern Lights. It certainly isn’t the only place to see the Aurora Borealis but combined with ash clouds, steam from geysers and the general weather conditions, it’s certainly one of the best.
Have you ever been to places with freaky weather? I was in Tobago in the rainy season and when the rains came, it seemed like the dead of night despite it being the middle of the day, with the way the sky went so black. Amazing! Weather can be fascinating – as long as it’s from a viewer’s standpoint and not being caught out in it. Don’t you think?
