March 1993: The Storm of the Century. It caused snow to fall in every part of Georgia. From the mountains down to the Florida line.

In the north Georgia mountains it caused a thunder blizzard. High winds, lightning, and 3+ feet of snow in a matter of hours. This is in a part of the country that rarely gets a dusting of snow. 10s of thousands of trees down. The sound of pine trees snapping in the middle of the night sounded like cannon’s being fired. Power was out for more than a week in many places in the mountains. It took four days for me to get a clear path cut from my home to the main road.

The first shower I had in more than a week was when I made it down to Atlanta for the Grateful Dead shows.

Not the worst, but the weirdest happened while I was fishing in Minnesota. We were in a boat on an empty lake. It was a bright clear day without a could in the sky. While we fished we watched a single small black cloud blow over the lake. As we watched, this little lone angry cloud homed in right for our boat. Just before it passed over us, it started dumping rain. It wasn’t more than 100ft wide, but it passed right over us. After that the cloud dissipated and blew away. The weather was totally clear the rest of the day. It was the most personalized storm ever.

I’ve been in 3 tornadoes… don’t wish to be in any more. If you see a green sky, get into a basement if you can and an interior room if you can’t.

In 2022 we had “calima” in southern Spain. It happens when wind blows in sand from Sahara and is quite common but this one was insane. I only have one shitty picture of it:

There’s no filter here and it’s in the middle of the day. This is what everything looked like. This is what it normally looks like:

It was as if the whole world got an instant sepia filter. When you were walking outside you could fell the sand in your eyes. Everything got covered in a thin layer of red sand. They had to pressure wash the whole region:

In the early 2000s I was at the beach on Long Island. It was midday, a cloudless sky, and hot. Suddenly there was a lot of shouting and pointing, and off in the distance you could barely see a water spout, like a tornado over the water and made of water. It went up into this tiny, dense little cluster of angry looking clouds that were just completely alone in the sky. As it got closer it started to hail golfball-size hailstones they were kind of hollow, like the good, crunchy ice from a fast food soda fountain. We got pelted for maybe 30 seconds and then the spout changed directions and headed out to sea, and the weather went back to normal as if nothing had happened. I occasionally ask my sister (who was there with me at the time) if she remembers, because it seems so odd I think I’m gaslighting myself.

Well I’ve got three answers to that.

The most severe weather I sheltered in place from was hurricane Fran. Fortunately it didn’t rearrange my family’s own chunk of the forest too bad but some trees were thrown on a few houses.

The most severe weather I’ve experienced unsheltered was Hurricane Noel. The dumbfuck 20 year old I used to be decided to ride a motorcycle from Daytona to West Palm Beach for no particular reason. I got my giblets rinsed. That wasn’t the most unpleasant weather I’ve ever been in though, I rode that same motorcycle through a freezing rain storm about 3 years later. I kept having to pound my fist into my visor to de-ice it.

The worst aftermath of weather I’ve seen but wasn’t personally in was an EF-3 tornado. It was on the ground for over an hour, it cut a path a thousand feet wide and easily 50 miles long, tearing through forest, neighborhoods and commercial districts. I worked as a flight instructor at a nearby airport, so afterward I got a fairly good look at the damage path from the air. It looked kind of like a logging operation, you know how they’ll take a parcel of land and clear cut it either for development or for the timber? Except smeared across the landscape crossing roads and taking houses and buildings with the trees.

Worst: Driving through a large Midwest city in the US on the freeway. Started raining. NBD. Then it got a lot harder. The wind really picked up fast. I’ve been around gust fronts and the like for thunderstorms before, this was unlike anything I’ve been through before. It got wild, fast. Tree parts and other debris started blowing past, it looked like what you’d think a tornado would, but it was far too widespread. Then the crazy thing…along with the wind, rain, and debris, the visibility dropped to near zero with a fog or mist in the span of a minute. We had to pull over and stop with everyone else, nobody could see for a few minutes. I have never seen that happen before, the rapid and violent change to weather and visibility over such a large area.

Coolest: Driving over the western High Desert in the US. Got caught up in a snowstorm with lots of wind. Found a safe place to spend the night after some white-knuckle driving for an hour or two. Plenty of vehicles pushed by wind or slid off the road, we were some of the only stupid ones left driving. No place to park safely, not enough gas for the rest of the night to keep warm. Don’t want to be the dead ones found with CO poisoning by the highway patrol the next day. Anyway, woke up the next day and it was crystal clear, literally. The air was full of fine ice crystals blowing in the wind. The bright sun had a huge halo and cross like a “+” along with some other tangential arcs that felt both close and far away to us at ground level. I’m sure folks in colder climes see these, but it was a new one to me. Pretty wild to see.

-40F to +40F in about a four hour period.

To answer the title question… many years ago I experienced a polar vortex that caused about a 100 degree temperature drop in less than 24 hours, that was pretty fun.

To address the body of OP, I would start taking important things out of the house and storing them somewhere safe… but I would think more storms = more damage = more likely the insurance cant deny you.

I mean I live in Nebraska so outside of tornados, hail, downpours, thunder-snow, 90 mph wind gusts, and extreme temperature changes over 24 hours ive seen mostly everything nature can throw at us.

I guess the weirdest was this one. In Nebraska weather at least during heavy thunderstorms comes from west and travels east. Sometimes from the south and sometimes north but never from the east.

This one came from the west, went east. Stopped, went back west with no precip and sat there building for a couple of hours. When it finally pushed east again. It was one of the hardest rainfalls I’ve ever seen

Hurricane with 2 week blackout following it.

Tornado but it was a block away - the sky was GREEN. I looked out the window and thought “that’s odd” then my brother called and said there is a tornado by you go take the kids to an interior room (hallway was best we could do). It knocked down a checkers and a car dealership, tossed cars around.

We get the occasional tornado here, but thankfully I have never seen one up close.

We get a shit-ton of hailstorms though, and occasionally the hailstones are big enough that if you’re outside during one, you’ll probably need a trip to the hospital. A lot of the older cars have golfball style dents and pretty much everyone has a story about trying to get insurance payots for holes in the siding of their house.

2 cyclones and a

firestorm (pyro cumulonimbus) that destroyed our village and a zillion acres in Australia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumulonimbus_flammagenitus

I’d take the cyclone

also 3 minor earthquakes (northern Thailand, New Zealand and The Philippines, in a what the fucking, fuck was that as the building shakes and near one volcano (Taal), I was in Tagaytay

I’m jinxed :)

Flash flood on the freeway back from Vegas. It was raining so hard we had to yell over it, then a semi passed us, dumped a waterfall on the windshield and the car in fronts tail lights stretched so far vertically we couldn’t gauge distance anymore and pulled over.

In my infinite wisdom after a week of filandering in the desert I elected to “experience the storm,” I got out, raised my arms, and felt every hair on my body stand up.

Scurried back in before my appointment with God.

I see I’ve got a fellow Hurricane Floyd survivor here. Here’s my story:

I was living in eastern NC at the time. What I remember is they expected the storm to pass through during the night. So we hunkered down, went to bed, I remember waking up a couple times during the night and hearing the wind but I didn’t get up to look.

In the morning I stepped outside and discovered that I couldn’t go anywhere. My apartment was at the top of an incline near a creek and most of what was below us was underwater. So many of my neighbors lost their homes, their cars…the streets were flooded. It was like living on an island. We had no power so I cooked with a little propane camping grill. I remember power being out for a couple days. Only once the power came back on did we realize the full extent of the damage. I vividly remember aerial footage of dead livestock floating in floodwaters.

I worked at a small music store at the time and it got completely gutted. Flood water came in the back entrance, went out the front entrance, and carried almost all our gear away with it. We had to reconstruct the entire interior of the building and purchase all new inventory. We weren’t able to open for business for almost two weeks.

Funny story about that: A few weeks later a guy came in carrying a power amp he said he found about a quarter mile away alongside the highway. He assumed it was ours. We checked the serial number and it was in fact ours, but by that time we had already received insurance and emergency funds and were able to write off almost all the lost inventory. So we said he could keep it. Couple weeks later he came back, said he disassembled it, let it all air dry for a couple days, reassembled it, and it worked fine. Dude scored a $700 power amp for free.