15 Strangest Weather Events So Far in 2015

Jon Erdman
Published: June 26,2015

The first half of 2015 has featured some truly strange weather. Floods have hammered places in exceptional drought -- some that are typically the driest in the world. We've seen feet of snow in a matter of weeks, as well as a stunning lack of snow with potentially dire consequences.
(MORE: 2014's Mid-Term Strangest Weather | 2013's Strangest | The World's Strangest)
Here are some of the strangest so far:

15. Strange Severe Slump

Map of all severe thunderstorm and tornado watches issued by the Storm Prediction Center from March 1-23, 2015. That's right, there were none.

 This is a map of all the thunderstorm and tornado watches NOAA's Storm Prediction Center posted in the U.S. from March 1 to March 24. Notice it's blank? Yeah. That's weird.
"This has never happened in the record of SPC watches dating back to 1970," said Greg Carbin, Storm Prediction Center warning coordination meteorologist in a SPC. "We are in uncharted territory with respect to lack of severe weather."
March 2015 ended with only 10 tornadoes nationwide, the fewest in any March since 1969. Over the previous 20 years, 78 tornadoes have touched down in March. This followed a February with only three tornadoes.
A jet-stream pattern suppressing warm, moist Gulf of Mexico air from making it into the central and eastern U.S. helped to put a lid on severe weather from January 5 through March 23. The virtual absence of any severe thunderstorms deep into March was odd, to say the least.
(FULL RECAP: March Severe Weather Drought)

14. Canadian Smoke Reaches Washington, D.C.

High-resolution satellite image from the NASA Terra satellite of smoke from Canadian wildfires over the Appalachians and Mid-Atlantic states on June 10, 2015.
(NASA Worldview)

 An extra pall of haze in parts of the Mid-Atlantic states one mid-June day wasn't from a hot, smoggy day as you might expect that time of year.
Instead, it was from wildfires burning in western and northwest Canada over 1,600 miles away. Fortunately the smoke was aloft, mainly between 7,000 to 16,000 feet, according to NASA's Earth Observatory.
While high-latitude wildfires are common in the warm season, and smoke does occasionally intrude into the western U.S., this penetration of smoke into the East was a little out of the ordinary.
"It's not unprecedented, but smoke this thick is not common in these parts," said NOAA research meteorologist Mark Ruminski in a NASA Earth Observatory blog.
(FULL RECAP: Canadian Wildfire Smoke in the U.S.)

13. Buried, Even By New England Standards

Lee Anderson adds to the pile of snow beside the sidewalk in front of his house in Somerville, Mass., Tuesday, Feb. 10, 2015, as his dog Ace looks on.
(AP Photo/Josh Reynolds)

Admittedly, ranking this 13th may not do it justice. It would be higher if at least some heavy snow wasn't typical of a New England winter.
Boston's Logan Airport measured over 9 feet of total snowfall in the record-setting wicked winter of 2014-2015.
Perhaps more stunning was how compressed the mammoth snowfall was. Boston picked up 90.2 inches of snow, more than double their annual average snowfall, in just 23 days from January 24 through February 15.
Taking the train and navigating down snow-choked streets and sidewalks became a daily challenge.
Given the persistent cold -- more on that later -- and mammoth snowpack, one Bostonian found an unread newspaper in the yard, still in its plastic, almost two months later.
All those snow days had a price. Boston Public Schools' last day of the 2014-2015 school year was pushed to June 29.
(RECAPS: New England's Record Snow | Late May Snowpile)

12. Brutal Winter to Record-Warm May

Daily high and low temperatures (dark blue trace) in 2015 through June 24. Blue arrows highlight period of persistent winter cold. Red arrows highlight period of persistent spring warmth. The average daily temperature range is shown by the brown-shaded area.

We just mentioned the incredible New England snow. That same stubborn pattern contributed to the second coldest February on record dating to 1895 in nine Northeast states, including all of New England, New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio.
February 2015 wasn't just the record coldest February in Syracuse, New York. It was also their coldest single month dating to 1903. Their average temperature during the month, taking into account actual highs and lows, was 9 degrees.
By May, the pattern shifted, making record warmth the talk of the Northeast. New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island each sweat through their record warmest May. Cities such as Concord, New Hampshire, and Rochester, New York, set record warm Mays. Syracuse just missed out on that lofty pedestal marking their third warmest May.
(RECAPS: February 2015 Was One of Coldest In Midwest, Northeast | May 2015 One of Warmest)

11. Four At Once!

Infrared satellite image of Tropical Cyclones Pam, Nathan, Olwyn and Bavi on March 12, 2015 at 11 a.m. U.S. EDT.

 The above satellite image was not a mashup of an active month in the tropics. This is an image of four simultaneous tropical cyclones in the eastern hemisphere on March 12, 2015.
Cyclone Olwyn made a landfall in western Australia. Nathan did a weird U-turn before making two Australian landfalls. Bavi weakened over the open western Pacific. Cyclone Pam hammered Vanuatu.
You can blame, in part, the Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO) and a "westerly wind burst" for the rich environment breeding this March foursome.
(FULL RECAP: Four Tropical Cyclones At Once)

10. Milky Rain Mystery

Milky rain collected in a glass in Spokane, Washington on February 6, 2015.
(NWS-Spokane, Washington)

No doubt car washes in parts of the Northwest were busy in early February. Parts of northeast Oregon, eastern Washington and the Idaho panhandle experienced a milky rain on February 6, coating vehicles with a milky-white residue.
At the time, various theories regarding the origin of the contaminants ranged from a distant volcanic eruption to ashfall from wildfires in 2014.
Washington State University scientists solved this puzzle in early June, concluding the sediment, high in sodium content, likely came from Summer Lake, a shallow, mainly dry lake bed in south-central Oregon northeast of Klamath Falls.
The WSU scientists said a dust storm the night before likely lofted dust from the lake, which later fell out in raindrops.

9. Icy Imprint

This icy imprint was left standing even after a Jeep pulled away from this parking lot in Greenville, North Carolina on February 17, 2015.
(Facebook/Trista Stiles)

We mentioned February was brutally cold in most of the East. Other than New England's giant snow piles, an icy photo from North Carolina may have been most emblematic of that month's misery.
Following a period of sleet and freezing rain, a Jeep didn't take its ice accumulation with it when pulling out of a Greenville, North Carolina, parking lot. It left it there.
(FULL WRITEUP: A Jeep's Icy Imprint)

8. Antarctica Heat

Location of Argentina's Esperanza Base.

Those are two words rarely joined together in any sentence.
On March 23, a weather station at Marambio Base on the Antarctic Peninsula recorded a high temperature of 63.3 degrees Fahrenheit. The following day, Esperanza Base, another station about 60 miles to the northeast, topped out at 63.5 degrees Fahrenheit.
These temperatures exceeded any previous record highs not only at those two locations, but anywhere else in Antarctica. For now, however, this potential continental temperature record remains unofficial, as Weather Underground's Christopher Burt details.
Coincidentally, this was also occurring as the U.S. snapped out of its early year severe weather slump, mentioned earlier.
(FULL RECAPS: Antarctica's All-Time Record? | Wunderblog)

7. Winter Storm + Tropical Landfall on Mother's Day

19 inches of snow piled up in Crawford, Nebraska, while Tropical Storm Ana soaked Ocean Isle Beach, North Carolina on May 10, 2015.
(Lisa Aschwege via KNEB-TV, left; Greg Agee, right)

Mother's Day 2015 was a strange one, meteorologically.
First, Tropical Storm Ana became the record earliest tropical or subtropical storm to make landfall on the U.S. Atlantic seaboard (neglecting a weird Groundhog Day 1952 Florida tropical storm), according to Stu Ostro, senior meteorologist at The Weather Channel.
Since it was still only early May, High Plains snowstorms were still within the realm of climatological possibility, and 2015 delivered with Winter Storm Venus dumping up to 2 feet of snow.
A landfalling tropical storm and a major winter storm simultaneously hitting on one early May weekend. Amazingly, this wasn't the first time this has happened -- but it's still rare enough to make our list.
(MORE: Tropical + Winter Storms at the Same Time...How Unusual Is That?)

6. "Haboob-nado"

A tornado and gust front in Jilin Province, China on May 31, 2015. (Newsflare)
(Newsflare)

You may have heard of, or experienced, a dust storm known as a haboob, which are common in the Middle East and U.S. Desert Southwest.
What appeared at first to be a haboob in China's Jilin Province on May 31 had something extra. It was rotating.
"It certainly had some significant rotation," said severe weather expert, Dr. Greg Forbes in an internal email. "I suspect it was a tornado with a big gust front; probably not a violent tornado."
"Haboobnado? Whatever it was, it was wild!" said senior meteorologist Stu Ostro.
The storm blew vehicles over and damaged buildings in Tongyu County.

5. Exceptional Drought to Massive Flooding

(Left) Ronald Gertson, a fourth generation rice farmer, shows where the level of water should be on a measuring stick in an irrigation canal as he deals with trying to grow rice during the severe drought on March 12, 2014 in Lissie, Texas. (Right) Water flows over the spillway from Lake Houston into the San Jacinto River Saturday, May 30, 2015, in Houston.
(Joe Raedle - Getty Images/AP Photo - David J. Phillip)

As spring 2015 officially arrived, a swath from central Texas to western and northern Oklahoma and the Texas panhandle was still mired in extreme drought, which had been in place in some areas since late 2010.
Reservoirs were still critically low. The city of Wichita Falls, Texas, was in a stage 5 drought catastrophe, as area reservoir levels were less than one-quarter of capacity.
Then a combination of record May rain, followed by Tropical Storm Bill in mid-June turned a drought into widespread flash flooding and river flooding in one of the sharpest drought-to-flood shifts imaginable.
Lake Texoma, along the Oklahoma/Texas border, reached a new record high on May 31, then nearly matched that level again three weeks later after Bill's rain soaked the Red River Valley.
Dallas, Houston, Austin, San Antonio, Corpus Christi, Oklahoma City, Norman and Tulsa all saw multiple flash flood events. River flooding swamped parts of Shreveport, Louisiana, Wichita Falls, Texas, and San Macros, Texas, among many locations.
May was the single wettest month on record in both Texas and Oklahoma, not to mention for the U.S. as a whole, once nationwide precipitation data was combined.
By late May and early June, two of the three reservoirs near Wichita Falls were at or above capacity. By mid-June, only a tiny part of the Texas panhandle remained in drought, while Oklahoma was completely drought free for the first time in over four years.

4.  The Extreme Frontier

A coal seam fire burns near Healy, Alaska on May 18, 2015 (left). Snow falls in Delta Junction, Alaska on June 1, 2015 (right).
(Alaska Division of Forestry, FAA/NWS-Fairbanks)

There may be no other state that typifies strange weather in 2015 than Alaska. Where do we begin?
January was the wettest on record in Juneau, and the December-February period was the state's seventh warmest. Anchorage saw its record least snowy season, picking up only 25.1 inches of snow from fall through spring.
That's all notable enough. Then spring became even more strange.
Record April warmth in Anchorage was followed by record May warmth for the entire state, when statewide data was compiled. This included America's northernmost city, Barrow.
On May 23, the village of Eagle topped out at 91 degrees, the earliest-in-season 90s on record anywhere in our 49th state.
About one week later on June 1, a location southeast of Fairbanks saw about an inch of snow, you know, that stuff that had been lacking in Anchorage all season.
During the spring melt, the swollen Sagavanirktok River flooded and damaged sections of the Dalton Highway, the only link by road to Alaska's North Slope, not once, but twice.
By mid-June, wildfires had erupted over the state's dry interior, many of which were started by lightning, belching out a pall of dense smoke in Fairbanks, among other locations.

3. A Snow Survey Without Snow

Frank Gehrke, left, chief of the California Cooperative Snow Surveys Program for the Department of Water Resources, points to a mark on the snowpack measuring pole that was the lowest previous snowpack level as Gov. Jerry Brown, center and Mark Cowin, director of the Department of Water Resources look on at a news conference near Echo Summit, Calif., Wednesday, April 1, 2015.
(AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)

If photos of low reservoirs weren't attention grabbing enough, perhaps the most bizarre sight during the worsening California water crisis took place on April Fools' Day 2015.
Each April 1, the California Department of Water Resources conducts a statewide snow survey, including manual measurements of the Sierra snowpack in several locations. Roughly one-third of California's drinking water comes from the Sierra snowpack, which after melting later in the spring and summer replenishes the state's reservoirs.
For the first time, the spring 2015 snow survey and news conference near Echo Summit was conducted on bare grass. Cooperative Snow Surveys Program chief Frank Gehrke could only point to the height on a measuring pole that was the previous record low snowpack there.
Statewide, the snowpack was only 5 percent of the April 1 average, by far the lowest on record for that date.
During that news conference, Gov. Jerry Brown announced mandatory statewide water restrictions for the first time in state history.
(FULL RECAP: California's Pathetic Spring Snow Survey)

2. Fog Bank Looks Like a Tsunami

A fog bank near the beach at Sea Girt, New Jersey, on May 31, 2015.
(Captain Jim Freda, Beach Manager for Borough of Sea Girt, New Jersey)

 If you planned a day at the beach along the southern New Jersey shore on May 31, you probably caught a sight few ever see.
We couldn't blame you if the first sight of this fog bank made you think of the Japanese tsunami of 2011.
In this case, this "wave of fog" was simply caused by warm air condensing over the cold ocean waters.
The clear area above the fog was thanks to a sea-breeze front which had previously pushed well inland, dissipating clouds above it, according to the National Weather Service.
(FULL RECAP: Fog Resembles a Tsunami Wave)

1. One of the World's Driest Places Flooded

A man clings to a security line to cross a street flooded by the overflowing of the Copiapo River due to heavy rainfall that affected some areas in the city, in Copiapo, Chile on March 26, 2015.
(STR/AFP/Getty Images)

 Imagine seeing over 14 years' worth of rain in 24 hours.
Chile's Atacama Desert is one of the world's driest places. The port city of Antofagasta picks up a mere 0.07 inches of rain a year. Compare that to Death Valley's 2.36-inch annual average precipitation.
In late March, Antofagasta picked up almost an inch of rain in 24 hours -- 0.96 inches, to be precise.
While this may not sound like much, as senior digital meteorologist Nick Wiltgen notes, "Without soil and plant cover to help absorb rainfall, it just runs off instantly as torrents of water."
Unfortunately, this proved deadly.
The torrential rain flooded the Copiapo River, claiming at least nine lives. Chile's Deputy Interior Minister Mahmud Aleuy called the flooding "the worst rain disaster to fall on the north in 80 years."
(FULL RECAP: Killer Floods Soak Chilean Desert)
This event occurred at the same time the Antarctic peninsula was setting record warmth, mentioned earlier. This was no coincidence, according to senior meteorologist Stu Ostro.
"That extreme rainfall in South America wasn't just from an isolated thunderstorm...it was with a larger-scale pattern, they key being a very strong ridge of high pressure aloft, as has been the case with so many precipitation and temperature extremes in recent years," said Ostro in an internal email.
"This may be the most extraordinary one so far, given that it involves both one of the world's driest locations and the coldest continent, and at the same time no less, and in the Southern Hemisphere."
This is why this ranked #1 on our list. Imagine what the rest of 2015 will bring.

MORE: Weirdest Sights on Earth