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| Middlebury, Vermont made the cut in the Weather Channel's list of weirdest national weather of 2021. A tornado struck the town on March 26, severely damaging this home. It's the only known March tornado to have occurred in Vermont |
They had plenty to pick from this year, with the weather so often off the rails, due largely to climate change.
Most of the weird list includes odd warm and hot spells and strange storms in places that aren't used to such things.
Vermont made the Weather Channel's list of weird weather. They highlighted that tornado that struck Middlebury in March. Tornadoes are rare in Vermont and they're completely unheard of in March in the Green Mountain State. At least until now, I guess.
Speaking of tornadoes, New Jersey seems to be the nation's new Tornado Alley. Thirteen tornadoes have been confirmed in New Jersey this year, as opposed to the annual average of one or two.
Wildfires loomed large in the headlines during 2021. Among the weirdest moments was a photo of a snow making machine going full blast at a ski resort called Sierra at Tahoe resort in August. They were not trying to get an early jump on the ski season.
It was a desperate attempt to wet the ground and increase the humidity in the air as a huge wildfire approached the resort. Between the snow making machines, firefighter efforts and luck, the resort survived the fire.
In other smoky news, a huge area of Siberia was on fire this summer, something that has become increasingly common. But for maybe the first time in recorded history, smoke from the fires went right over the North Pole in August.
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| Snowmaking equipment was pressed into service this summer at a Nevada ski resort to battle huge wildfires in the region. Photo by Josh Edelson/AFP via Getty Images. |
NASA scientists can't absolutely confirm this is the first time it happened, it does seem to be the first time this has been caught on satellite imagery.
The Weather Channel says another wildfire in British Columbia generated an enormous thunderstorm the size of Georgia
The updrafts from the intense heat and smoke of wildfires sometimes generate clouds known as pyrocumulonimbus, which is a thunderstorm generated by those updrafts. These are dangerous because they produce erratic winds that spread the wildfire beneath it. The lightning spitting out of these pyro-clouds start new fires.
This one was arguably the worst fire-generated thunderstorm on record. It yielded 113,000 cloud to lighting bolts, which is 5 percent of Canada's normal yearly total. That's impressive, as thousands of thunderstorms form in the vast landscape of Canada each year.
There was also strange heat in places we wouldn't expect. We know about British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest in June. But how about this? It was100 degrees in North Dakota. At the end of September.
It does sometimes get to 100 degrees in that northern state in the middle of summer. But it certainly has never happened on September 28. Until this year. It got up to 100 degrees in Dickenson and Watford.
The other odd heat wasn't that hot, but certainly bizarre for the location. The top of Greenland's ice sheet is more than 10,000 feet above sea level and is always frigid.
Ice core data indicates it had never been above freezing at Summit from at least the late 1800s to 1995, when it briefly got above freezing. Other brief thaws happened in 2012 and 2019. But rain had never been seen there.
Until August 14, when it rained at Summit Station and stayed above freezing for nine hours. If all that isn't a disconcerting sign of climate change I don't know what is.
In other warm weather news, cherry blossoms in Kyoto, Japan bloomed the earliest in the season in at least 1,200 years.
And one final small weird moment: Near Madison, Wisconsin in September, small hail that resembled donuts or more accurately Cheerios turned up.
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