"Unusual weather we're having, ain't it?"
— Cowardly Lion, The Wizard of Oz (1939)
Real Life has its share of dangerous or unusual weather, which can be integrated into the plot. Storms can do untold damage on land and sea, acid rain devastates the environment, sandstorms bring desert travel to a halt and heavy rain makes everyone feel a bit gloomy. But sometimes this isn't enough.
This trope covers bizarre and deadly forms of weather that wouldn't normally occur on Earth. This might be because it's caused by something in the setting (e.g. mountains that storms blow shards of volcanic glass down from). This typically helps world-build and make it more unique (it's hard to get more detailed than by mapping out the ecosystem). It can also be something clearly unnatural within the setting (e.g. aliens have turned all the water in the clouds into hydrogen peroxide in a fiendish plot to turn everyone into bleach blondes). This makes it clear that whatever caused it is extremely powerful (it's hard to get more dangerous than by messing with the ecosystem).
Some specific types can include:
- Phlebotinum Charged Storms: Huge sustained discharges of supernatural or mundane energy, including but not limited to Pure Energy from Green Rocks, Wild Magic, Reality Going Out to Lunch or Soul Power. Often weakening the boundaries between Another Dimension or a Dark World. They may also herald a Flying Dutchman.
- Weird Wind: A strong breeze (or full-on gale) blows something around, either in the style of a sandstorm, or a twister, spreading the effects of Green Rocks and plagues far and wide or simply shredding everything it its path.
- Peculiar Precipitation: Common in both Mordor and Gaia's Lament, the land has been so damaged that even the rain falling from the sky has become poisonous, radioactive, boiling hot, or even Hollywood Acid. Less dangerous examples can still be disturbing or just plain weird. Your standard umbrella or raincoat won't protect you and in extreme cases not even a hardened environment suit will withstand the rain's corrosive properties.
- Strangeshine: Something in the sky (be it a Weird Moon, a Sun, artificial satellite or mysterious comet) bombards the land with energy which can be deadly, mutagenic or just wake up the local Kaiju population.
Because of the hazardous nature of this weather, it often shows up as Hostile Weather. The more dangerous versions are common on Death Worlds and anywhere else you can find Everything Trying to Kill You. In general, this is also what you can expect to come blowing out of an Alien Sky.
Compare/contrast Death from Above (things dropping from the sky due to artificial causes, like Rain of Arrows or Orbital Bombardment), Rain of Blood (when it's literal), Perpetual Storm (an otherwise normal weather phenomenon which lasts indefinitely), and Empathic Environment where the weather reflects the fact that something dramatic is happening (the two can overlap, however, when the empathic weather is also bizarre weather).
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stone Ocean has Weather Report. His Stand which is also named Weather Report, can control the weather to his liking. This results in situations such as a storm raining poisonous frogs, and eventually an extreme case whereby Weather creates rainbows that implant subliminal messages into people that make them think they're snails and then they begin to transform into snails.
- One Piece: The weather on the Grand Line is notoriously unpredictable; clear skies can suddenly become torrential without warning and clear up just as quickly as they start. On some occasions they experience stuff like candy rain. Then the weather of the New World is shown. Notable phenomena include rain and hail with droplets bigger than ships, a literal wall of snowfall, an island with perpetual lightning storms, giant fissures opening and closing in the middle of the ocean and on one occasion an apparent black hole appearing in the sky above.
- Starzinger: Because of the decrease in the galaxy's energy, the Earthern sun starts fizzing out, and the planet is hit by all sorts of abnormal weather events. This includes giant, robeast dinosaurs showing up out of nowhere and levelling Earthern cities.
Comic Books
- The Motherless Oven features knife storms and laughing gales of wind. All the weather is controlled by the Weather Clock, which is an actual living creature.
- My Little Pony: The Storm of Zephyr Heights: The titular storm is surrounded by a wall of wind that pegasi can't fly through, so Zipp, Pipp, and Sunny have to fly over it instead. They arrive in Clousdale and learn it was caused by a malfunctioning weather machine.
- Rain is about an apocalyptic scenario where one day it starts raining crystal needles in the USA. It starts in one area and begins to spread, with the rain varying in size and duration. The focus character is a survivor on a quest to reach her girlfriend's father after both she and her girlfriend's mother died in the first rain.
Fan Works
- dC/dt≠0: During storms in the Everfree Forest, thunder precedes the lightning.
- Nine Days Down: Weather in Tartarus occurs less so as a natural phenomenon than as a direct action by the living consciousness of the dimension Itself based on what It happens to think is funny or dramatically appropriate. As a result, besides regular rain, Tartarean weather can include things like showers of blood or mercury, freezing fog, and tornadoes of biting beetles, all of which can occur underground just as easily as on the surface.
- Dungeon Keeper Ami: "A Meddler Appears" has a character think about the possibility of acidic precipitation from the evil-corrupted environment of the Avatar Islands:
It wasn’t raining acid right now, thankfully.
- Of Crystal Shards and Dust: Due to Lucis' appearance in Remnant, several unusual weather phenomena begin to occur. These range from from thunder storms and water twisters to giant earthen spires rising from the ground and icebergs being reported off the coast of Vacuo — even though, according to Ozpin, Vacuo hasn't had any cold weather in the last hundred years.
- Pikmin Squared: The Chaos Randomizer option of this Game Mod introduces a "weather" setting to the areas that consists of bizarre effects. One of the tamest is the Darkness, which makes the given area appear to be at night even in daylight hours. Other "weather" effects include Mating Season (enemies spawn Bulborb Larvae on death), the Big One (a colossal boss appears in the map), Boulder Rain (rocks raining from the sky), and the Snap (a white flash will appear on the screen and wipe out half of the active Pikmin/enemies at some point in the day).
- Vow of Nudity: The stories Bonus Encounters: Last Catgirl Standing and The Arcane Tower'' include a rare weather called "unburdening mist" which only allows creatures to pass through it, meaning travellers must strip naked if they wish to enter afflicted areas.
Films — Animated
- Fantastic Planet: Planet Ygam has at least one season where crystals quickly grow and entrap anything that isn't moving. All it takes to shatter them though, is a simple whistle, which Tiwa gladly teaches to Terr.
- Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf: Meet the Pegasus at one point features technicolor rain and lightning that forms over the Solid Clouds the goats stand on, each drop and bolt a different color. One of the rain droplets forms a tree that the goats pull out of the clouds, revealing a bunch of beach items that Slowy decides would be good to build "sand" castles in the sky.
Films — Live-Action
- Escape Room: Tournament of Champions: The fourth room features hydrochloric acid rain that will melt through almost any object, contestants included.
- Ghostbusters II has clouds — apparently a concentrated form of mood slime — cause an eclipse as Vigo's power rises in the run-up to New Year's Eve.
- Sharknado and its sequels center around perhaps one of the most ridiculous examples of this trope, a tornado... made of SHARKS (well, more like full of sharks... which are still alive, and lethal, after many hours of being aloft and flung here, there and everywhere, including outer space).
- Slipstream (1989): The Slipstream is a permanent world-encircling wind, like the jetstream but at low level, affecting the environment and culture of an After the End future. Cults worship the wind, people live in houses dug into cliffs, and traders travel via balloons and light aircraft.
Literature
- The Avatar Series: During the original trilogy, without a God or Goddess to direct it, nature runs wild. Rain falling up is the least strange thing you can see during the Time of Troubles.
- Bartholomew and the Oobleck centres around a king who demands a new kind of weather of a group of wizards loosely attached to his court. He gets a rain of big balls of viscous goop called "oobleck" that rapidly floods the kingdom, trapping citizens and wildlife in its stickiness, as his long-suffering page boy Bartholomew Cubbins attempts to convince him to admit it was a mistake.
- The Book of Dragons: In "Maybe Just Go Up There and Talk to It", as the dragons become increasingly entrenched on Earth, they begin to gradually alter the weather. The climate gradually begins to warm, extending the growing season, even as cold winds blow erratically and unseasonably, while sunlight grows unnaturally honey-colored and the air becomes charged with electricity.
- The Brightest Shadow: Both clouds and sunlight are influenced by the Legend, both influencing the people below and leading to strange phenomena like the sun seeming to stand still in the sky.
- Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs: Ordinary weather in Chewanswallow rains food and drink, sparing the land from many of the world's problems and creating others. Unfortunately, Chewanswallow eventually becomes uninhabitable after the falling food starts getting bigger and bigger.
- Darth Bane: In Path of Destruction, Bane encourages the Sith fighting on Ruusan to summon a Force-powered storm that levels the forest the Republic forces were occupying. The combination of the destruction and the miasma of evil energy also drives the formerly peaceful native "bouncers" insane, turning them from bringers of comfort to feared and pitied psychic scourges.
Darth Bane: Now look at that map and think like a Sith. Don't just fight in the forests... destroy the forests!
- Destroyermen has a rare green storm that picks up any vessel that drives into it and deposits them in a parallel world. Walker and Mahan ran into one while trying to escape the Amagi. It's summoned by the presence of large masses of metal on the sea.
- Dragonriders of Pern: The greatest danger on the eponymous alien planet is "Thread", a type of spore that eats any organic matter it touches. Whenever a neighbouring planet orbits through Pern's sky, Thread falls, ravaging all farms and forests in its path. There is nothing the Pernese won't do to escape it, including moving continents and genetically engineering an entire species (dragons, whose fiery breath is one of few things that can destroy it).
- The Magical Monarch of Mo is about a Cloudcuckooland where it rains lemonade and snows popcorn, "and the lightning in the sky resembles the most beautiful fireworks; and the thunder is usually a chorus from the opera of Tannhäuser." The land, rain, and snow all return in The Scarecrow of Oz.
- Psychlone is a horror novel by Greg Bear involving a psychic tornado created by the Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
- Rainbow Magic: In the Weather Fairies' series, the fairies' weather feathers being stolen causes weather in Wetherbury to go completely crazy.
- Crystal the Snow Fairy: Crystal's missing magic makes it snow in summer.
- Abigail the Breeze Fairy: Abigail's missing magic makes wind blow unreasonably strong.
- Pearl the Cloud Fairy: Pearl's missing magic makes clouds hang over people's heads.
- Goldie the Sunshine Fairy: Goldie's missing magic makes the sun so hot, it makes corn pop right off the cob.
- Evie the Mist Fairy: Evie's missing magic makes a very thick fog hang over the woods.
- Storm the Lightning Fairy: Storm's missing magic makes lightning glitter.
- Hayley the Rain Fairy: Hayley's missing magic makes it rain enough to cause a huge flood.
- The Salvation War: A favorite tactic of Yahweh's is to strengthen and direct Earthly storms by funneling hot air into them through Heavengates.
- Siren Novels: Every time the sirens kill their victims, an unforecasted heavy storm forms over Winter Harbor and dissipates just as suddenly. Meteorologists are baffled by the number of mysterious storms, and by the fact that they never occur over any town in the area besides Winter Harbor.
- The Stormlight Archive:
- Highstorms, solid walls of wind and water sweeping from east to west that scour away any trace of soil, kill anyone caught unprotected, and carry with them the godlike spren who charge exposed gems with Stormlight. They aren't actually separate storms at all, but a single storm that constantly circles the globe.
- In Words of Radiance, the desperate Parshendi unleash the Everstorm, an even nastier highstorm that travels in the opposite direction and destroys the very ground when the two collide.
- Rhythm of War shows that Shadesmar has its own weather patterns, which are nothing like any weather in the Physical. Examples include "crystalline" weather (which makes the Shadesmar equivalent of plants grow almost fast enough to see), and weather patterns that make certain spren more energetic or lethargic.
- The Weirdstone of Brisingamen: The climactic action takes place in a world where "normal" rural Cheshire in England overlaps with the older Faerie world. Even though it is early spring, the Mara, a sort of ice troll, bring the "fimbulwinter" with them, seeking to trap the heroes in the open: the world is beset with a magically-generated blizzard and seasonally unrealistic snow, ice and subzero temperature.note
Podcasts
- Midst: The small planet of Midst is in the dead center of the known universe, on the boundary line between the Un and the Fold. Because of that, it's wracked by "tearrors" whenever the Fold kicks up a storm, unleashing monsters and random mutations on the inhabitants. They have weather almanacs to predict when they'll kick up. Sometimes they're even accurate.
Radio
- Torchwood (BBC Radio): "The Dead Line" reveals that the Rift is capable of creating odd weather situations, in this case creating lightning that causes several telephones to go off at once and puts people into trance-like states.
Tabletop Games
- DragonQuest (1980): In the supplement The Enchanted Wood, unnatural weather in the titular forest includes a variety of damage-causing hail (black, explosive, gemstone, glowing, huge, and invisible), a dense fog that manifests an evil strangling mist, razor sleet that cuts up any creature it hits, black rain that corrodes anything it touches (including living creatures) like acid, and a blazing sun that causes exhaustion and dehydration.
- Dungeons & Dragons:
- In Module I12, Egg of the Phoenix, while the Player Characters are traveling from the Crypts of Empyrea back to Nimbortan, they will encounter a brief bizarre storm. It starts with a gale force wind, continues with rain that is almost boiling hot, then changes to razor-sharp sleet that slices exposed flesh and clothing to ribbons. Not to mention Hostile Weather while they take the egg back.
- In Elder Evils, one of the more common Signs of the End Times is unnatural weather. The specifics vary from case to case, but can include unseasonal weather extremes, destructive whirlwinds, oddly colored clouds and lightning, and rains of fire, objects, slime or living animals.
- Forgotten Realms: In The Savage Frontier, Wizard Weather in the High Forest can include red snow ("that tastes like blood"), hot rain ("which boils the flesh"), blizzards in summer, exotic (invisible, multi-colored, huge, explosive, glowing and/or black) hailstones, dense fog (with evil creatures lurking within), razor-sharp sleet ("draws blood and scores metal"), black acidic rain, and desert-like blazing heat.
- Planebreaker: The Storm of the Styx is a wandering demonic invasion housed in a tornado's cloak. When it appears in a world of the Material Plane, high winds and rampaging demons devastate an area. The storm usually lasts for a few days, often tracing a river's course until it reaches a lake or large body of water, before fading.
- Gods of the Fall: The Delirium can take several forms, but usually appears as a violet mist or thunderhead underlit by lightning.
- Invisible Sun: Satyrine has strange weather systems, but none hold a more significant place in the minds of its inhabitants than the storms that bring keyfalls, where keys rain from the sky.
- Numenera:
- Potential types of weather in the Ninth World include oily black rains that kill plant life, magnetic winds, ground-hugging electrical storms, blizzards of glasslike shards, rains of tiny squids, rains of flesh-eating fungus, and clusters of tornadoes. The most dangerous is the Iron Wind, a storm of airborne Gray Goo, malfunctioning and mad, that transforms everything it touches into surreal and horrific forms when it doesn't simply unmake it completely. Its opposite number is the Godsend, a wind of nanites that heal and strengthen living flesh.
- The welkerwind is a fierce, angry blow that storms down off the Black Riage to the Slant Milieu almost constantly, day in and day out, to the point that the trees bend sideways, the mountains point their tops toward the ground, and creatures become stooped and hunched.
- The Westwind is a corkscrewed tornado that constantly moves in the Caecilian Jungle and carries trees, animals and all manner of debris, changing its size depending on what it holds.
- When the winds rise in the Jagged Wastes, they gather the glass shards on the ground and carry them along like tiny razors and needles. After such a storm, one can find the skeletons of unlucky travellers, covered in tattered, bloody flesh.
- In the dimension of New Yenth, all living things are insects of some kind, and so is a good deal of the weather. Most clouds are in fact swarms of tiny, biting insects called dalds. Occasionally these give way to huge dark "thunderheads", whose droplets are each condensed around a flying insect. These sometimes "rain" to the ground in voracious swarms that will devour anything that doesn't find cover.
- Predation: Time terrors are giant storms that appear suddenly and with little to no warning. Each storm seems to be self-contained, as if housed within an invisible barrier. Reports from eyewitnesses outside the storm barrier talk about seeing the lightning coming right for them and then disappearing before it arrives, or seeing a strong wind devastating objects right in front of them, without ever feeling so much as a slight breeze on their own skin.
- Shadowrun:
- The continent of Australia is plagued by violent and massive mana storms.
- While not as bad, the North American weather system is fairly messed up as well; it's speculated it's a lingering after-effect of the Great Ghost Dance.
- Talislanta: As a result of the Great Disaster, Talislanta is subject to various forms of aberrant weather, including Black Lighting, The Black Wind, and Icicle Rain. Also counts as Hostile Weather.
- Warhammer 40,000: Warp storms are disturbances over vast expanses of space that can engulf entire systems, cutting off sections for galaxy for centuries at a time. The Dark Eldar and forces of Chaos can exerce some measure of control.
Theatre
- Julius Caesar (Shakespeare): Caesar's wife Calpurnia makes note of several portents which indicate bad things happening, including:
Fierce fiery warriors fought upon the clouds,
In ranks and squadrons and right form of war,
Which drizzled blood upon the Capitol
Video Games
- Animal Jam: "The Great Escape" opens with sludge raining from the sky, something Cosmo states was somehow thanks to the phantoms.
- Blaseball has been no stranger to absurd weather conditions ever since the Forbidden Book was opened at the end of its first season, with Solar Eclipses, Black Holes, Sun 2, "lots of birds," storms comprised entirely of peanuts, roster-shuffling Reverb, Feedback, Bloodrain, three different varieties of coffee rain, Flooding, and even... Salmon. Yes. All of that can seriously happen.
- Command & Conquer: Tiberian Series: as Earth is becoming progressively more Tiberium-ridden, the weather makes a real turn for the worse with rampant ion storms and Tiberium shard downpours.
- CTGP Revolution has Item Rain as a game mode, in which items fall from the sky. If All Items can Land is on, then Bullet Bills and Lightning items can fall, as well as Bobombs and land-mine Blue Shells.
- Death Stranding:
- One of the major threats is a mysterious rainstorm called the "Timefall", which looks almost exactly like normal rain but rapidly ages anything it touches.
- An inverted rainbow that's missing the color blue is often seen just before Beached Things start showing up. This is also usually accompanied by heavy Timefall storms.
- Dome Keeper: Sometimes, the player will come up from their mines to find that the sky is raining a suspiciously rusty red substance.
- Dwarf Fortress:
- One version had superheated rain that could literally melt the flesh off a dwarf's body. It was considered a Good Bad Bug and, naturally, players found ways to weaponize it
, mostly by forcing goblins to go through it (as they try to find the fastest way into your fortress) and sending male cats to eat vermin remains to have all of their fat melt out of their bodies and kill them, thereby removing two problems (goblins attacking and "catsplosion") at once and letting your dorfs profit off of their deaths.
- Evil regions have a 50% chance of having freakish weather, which can be either a Rain of Blood, toxic goop, or clouds of enthralling dust. Regardless of its type, anyone caught inside will complain of experiencing unnatural weather. Unless the Fun gets them first, that is.
- One version had superheated rain that could literally melt the flesh off a dwarf's body. It was considered a Good Bad Bug and, naturally, players found ways to weaponize it
- The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind: The island of Vvardenfell is regularly covered in ash storms, where the wind picks up the soot and dust from the Red Mountain volcano in the middle of the island. However, until the main quest of the game is resolved, the normal ash storms are replaced with "blight storms" — ash storms that additionally infect everyone caught out in the open when they are hit with the Blight and Corprus diseases. (Though this cannot happen to the player character. It was supposed to be a gameplay mechanic, but had to be axed due to technical limitations.)
- Elona has the Etherwind, a supernatural glowing blue wind that plagues the continent every three months, inflicting anything caught inside with The Corruption. It mysteriously originated from Vindale Forests, and the resident elf population took the blame for it.
- Epic Battle Fantasy 5 has weather like "Energy", "Radiation" and "Lava Flow" that are not weather at all. There's even weather like "??—[[/@#,," in glitch areas.
- Equin: The Lantern: Indoor rain levels prevent the use of campfires and torches, douse fire tiles and increase the odds of ponds, flower patches and mushrooms. Fishing also becomes easier. Towards the end of the game, those will turn into thunderstorms that will sometimes strike random panels. Thunder can deal you 10 damage if you don't have lightning resistance, but if it happens to strike an enemy, any enemy, it will instantly kill them.
- Fallen London:
- Sunless Sea: The shores of the Elder Continent are intermittently troubled by the Waxwinds, carrying molten wax from somewhere closer to the Mountain of Light. It prevents your ship from using its full speed and is described as scarring your skin, but fortunately doesn't cause any serious damage; unfortunately, it also doesn't impede Blue Prophets from swarming your crew.
- Sunless Skies: One often finds some harsh winds blowing through the High Wilderness that have strange effects on your vessel and its passengers/cargo.
- Most common are the Peacock Wind of the Reach, which will cause vegetables aboard to sprout and grow with edible, but unnerving, nodules (and may also be the soul of a dead sun), and the Candlewind, which will rot away your supplies and starve all aboard and has a reverse push on your vessel than it'd seem (as in, going against the wind is faster). Both, naturally, cause your Terror to rise.
- The Storm That Speaks also occasionally pops up in certain places in the Reach. Think of a sentient, extremely lightning-prone hurricane with familiar whispers on its winds and with which you can strike up conversations if you're charismatic enough (or have brought gifts of bottled souls), and you've more or less got it. It's a weird entity even by this universe's standards.
- Fallout:
- Fallout: New Vegas: Lonesome Road has the Divide and its violent desert storms. As it turns out, the scientists of Big Mountain used the place as a testing ground for their experiments and caused the storms... that would later give birth to the Marked Men.
- Fallout 4: The weather system (which mostly simulates normal weather) will sometimes subject the player to radiation storms, which randomly cause radiation poisoning while they're outside. This is due to the Glowing Sea, a massive patch of irradiated hell created when a Chinese nuke detonated outside of Boston. The radiation storms are so powerful that they travel all the way up to Bar Harbor, Maine, a whopping 285 miles.
- The Half-Life 2 mod-story G-String features sections where Myo must use whatever routes have cover shielding her from acid rain that is capable of quickly melting both her suit protection power and health, as well as traversing interior areas that are flooded with the caustic substance as well.
- Half-Life 2 and its episodes occasionally make reference to "Portal Storms" occurring in the early days of the Alien Invasion, during which tears in reality temporarily link Earth with the plane of Xen at random places. This results in widespread infrastructure damage due to Telefragging and Portal Cutting, and also generates massive mundane thunderstorms as an exotic alien atmosphere materializes, interacts, and reacts with Earth's atmosphere.
- I Was a Teenage Exocolonist: "Sparksnow" on Vertumna is like the Earth kind of snow, except that it's blue, not cold, and mildly acidic. Good for sculpting, though.
- Metroid: Acid rain is a recurring hazard on the surface areas of planets:
- Super Metroid and Metroid: Zero Mission: Acid rain appears on the surface of Zebes. This rain isn't actually dangerous enough to hurt you.
- Metroid Prime 3: Corruption: More acid rain appears on the Space Pirate Homeworld. Unlike other games, you need a specific acid-proof "hazard shield" item to protect Samus from it. Enemies however seem immune to the rain.
- Pacific Drive: The bizarre reality-bending Exclusion Zone naturally has some strange weather in it. These are known as "squalls" and are very small storms that rapidly pass through an area, with anomalous effects on anything within them. The most basic are Hurricane Squalls, which simply cause extremely high winds in random directions. Electromagnetic Squalls cause electrical items within them to go haywire. Seismic Squalls cause earthquakes which feature pillars of earth rising up at random before retracting a few seconds later. Corrosive Squalls turn the air acidic and feature a rain of blobs of concentrated acid. The most dangerous are Meteor Squalls, which have huge chunks of radioactive stone falling down at random (despite the name, they are not actual meteors: the stone chunks spontaneously pop into existence a few hundred feet into the air).
- Pajama Sam 2: Thunder and Lightning Aren't so Frightening: After Sam breaks World Wide Weather's Weather-Control Machine, the planet's weather goes haywire. The console in the control room shows places like Seattle not having rain and a tropical island getting snowed on, among other oddities.
- Postal 2: At the end of Friday, when all of Dude's errands are finished (or are they?) it literally starts raining cats. Not dogs though so no Visual Pun for us.
- Slime Rancher: As well as regular weather conditions such as rain and snow, Rainbow Island rarely experiences slimefall, where slimes fall from the sky en masse.
- S.T.A.L.K.E.R. has an event called an "emission" or a "blowout", the single most dangerous thing about the Zone. When one happens, after a bit of low droning sounds coming from nowhere, the sky turns blood-red, weird cloud formations suddenly take shape, lightning starts flashing chaotically, and the ground starts rumbling as massive shockwaves of energy roll across the land. This continues for several minutes, and anyone who didn't manage to find shelter in time instantly drops dead. In the original Shadow of Chernobyl, only two happen as scripted story events. In Clear Sky and Call of Pripyat, however, they happen at random.
- Tavern Talk: In Tempest Tantrum, Voy reports getting lost in "fuzzy", low-visibility weather on the way to the Tavern, howling winds so loud, he couldn't think well, and Grace's or Skully's compass going haywire when he tried using it. The next day, Oleander reports being caught in a magical storm with the party he was guiding, which melted away their leader and turned the others into frogs. It's caused by the fire spirit Melli accidentally unleashed from the contraption she found in Clay's animal shelter.
- Terraria:
- A semi-frequent event is "Slime Rain", during which slime enemies constantly fall from the sky. Given the weakness of Slimes, it's more an annoyance than anything else. It lasts either until sunset, or until King Slime shows up and is killed.
- In words generated with the special seeds "Don't dig up" or "Get fixed boi," rain and wind will occur underground, in the layer that is meant to simulate the surface of a normal world. The actual surface will not have the given weather effect. No explanation is given for this.
- In Thaumcraft 5, high flux in the aura can manifest as a Taint Storm, a purple thunderhead that rains toxic "flux goo" and has a high chance to turn the area into Tainted Land.
- Ultima VII Part II has the "teleport storm" at the start that swaps a whole bunch of your most useful items with random junk and causes Iolo to vanish qualifies.
- Warcraft III:
- In the final level of the orc campaign, the characters are startled by the sky filling with fire before giant burning demons attacking your base from all sides in addition to the fel orcs.
Jaina: Thrall, the sky is... burning!
Thrall: Blessed ancestors... this is no natural storm! - The final level of The Frozen Throne's Blood Elf campaign has what looks like a firestorm rapidly approaching the just-captured Black Citadel, only to reveal itself as Illidan's pissed-off boss Kil'jaeden, who's approximately twice the size of the battlements.
- In the final level of the orc campaign, the characters are startled by the sky filling with fire before giant burning demons attacking your base from all sides in addition to the fel orcs.
- WorldBox: Rain of lava and Hollywood Acid, mountain-raising earthquakes, Curse a tornado to make it envelop a continent, literal Rain of Blood that heals you, and, of course, raining nukes.
- Xenoblade Chronicles X: Planet Mira has weather patterns similar to Earth's, including rain and sandstorms. But its harsher environments have unusual weather phenomena that are unique to their respective continents. Such as: Oblivia's electromagnetic storms, Sylvalum's spore clouds, and Calduros' brimstone rain.
Web Animation
- RWBY: In the Ever After, there is a bizarre weather phenomenon called a "punderstorm". If you're within range of the storm, any turn of phrase you say becomes literal. The only way out of the bizarre scenarios your words can make is to resolve the situation that triggered the effect or wait for the storm to blow over. For example, when Weiss complains that the Ever After "really is the pits", a pit opens under her feet and drops her for a few seconds until she lands where she started.
- Zsdav Adventures: In Bajos utazók: Agzt pálinka robotai (Problematic travelers: Agzt's palinka robots), the characters crashland on a planet where palinka rains instead of water.
Web Originals
- In Deltarune Good Version, Ralsei insinuates that the prophecy foretells the ground and sky filling with cocaine.
- Eventide Media Center: In "Oceanview Forecast", the storm isn't quite your typical thunderstorm. When it is shown on the radar projection, it is actually a giant monstrous face.
- SCP Foundation: SCP-2049 is an anomalous weather report broadcast which describes and is followed by a variety of unusual weather. Examples include fog made of cotton candy, radiation storms, weather balloon downpours, and a low-speed monofilament tornado.
- Skies Unbroken: The World in the Sky has an Alien Sea of clouds, and some of them are phlebotinum-charged. There's also a storm that has lasted years without dissipating.
- ZaneGames: In "Pokemon Quiz But The Quiz NEVER STARTS?!", the weather app on the bottom of Zane's computer starts out normal, reporting ordinary conditions like "partly cloudy". Then the weather gets completely absurd, such as entirely disappearing for a few minutes (rendering the entire world weatherless) or having a temperature of "x2 Celsius".
Western Animation
- Centaurworld: In "Fragile Things", the group runs into a "taurnado", a tornado with funnels arranged like four legs, a horizontal torso and a neck, which actively tries to suck them into itself.
- Courage the Cowardly Dog: In "Little Muriel", Nowhere is plagued by tornadoes (which is mundane in Kansas) that de-age anyone swept up in them (which isn't) and can be stopped by being tripped. The episode ends with a sudden tidal wave washing over Nowhere, which is entirely illogical, considering Nowhere is in Kansas, nowhere near any body of water large enough to cause a tidal wave to surge over the entire town. Courage even lampshades this by remarking "Crazy weather we've been having, huh?"
- DuckTales (2017): In "Challenge of the Senior Junior Woodchucks!", the rain on the island is electrified and zaps with every drop.
- The Garfield Show: The Weather-Control Machine seen in "Unfair Weather" can create food-based storms alongside regular weather; all you need to do is dump the desired food into the machine, and a cloud will appear and start dropping the food in question.
- Hazbin Hotel:
- In the season 1 episode "Scrambled Eggs", acid rain is briefly mentioned as being something that occurs in Hell.
- The season 2 episode "Scream Rain" is named after a storm phenomenon in Hell where lightning makes screaming sounds rather than thunder. Cherri's comment that rain has no business screaming like that and Vox's confusion at the end imply that this is weird even by Hell's standards.
- Hey Arnold!: In "Stinky's Pumpkin", the City suffers from torrential rain, a drought and snow, as Stinky himself puts it "All in the same dang week!"
- My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: In "The Return of Harmony, Part 1", the return of Discord, the Spirit of Chaos, is marked by clouds of cotton candy that rain chocolate milk.
- The Owl House: The Boiling Isles don't have weather, they have plagues. Gorenadoes, painbows that turn you inside out if you look at them, and boiling rain are just a few examples.
- She-Ra and the Princesses of Power: In "Light Hope", once Entrapta begins hacking the Black Garnet, a large bolt of red and black energy fires up into the sky above the Fright Zone and causes red lighting storms. It also begins snowing in the Whispering Woods, which is noted to be an impossible anomaly.
- The Simpsons: In the Flashback episode "And Maggie Makes Three", Homer is going back to the Nuclear Plant to get his old job back, having to give up his dream job of working in a bowling alley, in order to support his now five-member family. When he left the bowling alley they gave him a satin jacket as a souvenir. As he trudges towards the plant, an acid rain shower hits him, disintegrating the jacket but leaving everything else untouched.
Real Life
- Titan, the largest of Saturn's moons where surface temperatures are around -180 °C, has methane rains that in the equatorial regions are thought to take the form of violent storms. The quirk comes when you notice that Titan's surface gravity is less than 1/6th of the Earth's one so the droplets would appear to fall in slow motion. All of this accompanied of how "clear skies" there means an always orange and murky sky. Other hydrocarbons are also believed to exist in liquid form on Titan's surface, and presumably can also be found in the rain, making the moon a much-desired candidate for further exploration.
- Venus’s state as a Death World - with one aspect being its sulfuric acid rain - is already well known, but did you know that it has its own bizarre version of snow? High on the slopes of Maxwell Montes, Venus’s tallest mountain, snow falls from the incredibly dense clouds of sulfuric acid and other toxic compounds, but this snow isn’t water… rather, it’s a mix of lead sulfide (aka Galena) and bismuth sulfide (aka Bismuthinite).
- Weather on gas giant planets is strongly influenced by both the residual heat of the planet's formation (which can be a lot) and the depth of their atmospheres (thousands of kilometers)note , all of this translating — in our Solar System at least — into strong winds with speeds of several hundred kilometers per hour plus huge storms that may occupy a significant fraction of the planet's area.
- Many of the gas giants of the solar system have high amounts of carbon and intense internal pressure, creating the possibility of raining actual diamonds. This isn't as great as it sounds though, the planets mentioned as candidates are Jupiter (known for its gravity) and Saturn (which has winds of 1800 km/h). So these diamonds will either crush you, or strip the flesh off of you. In the case of Jupiter and Saturn, it is believed that intense lightning storms high in the planets' dense atmospheres react with carbon dioxide to produce clumps of soot, which then fall deep into the depths, where a combination of the incredible pressure and temperatures spontaneously compress the carbon into diamonds of varying sizes, with most predicted to be around the size of most cut diamonds you'll find on jewellery. As the diamonds near the core, they melt down and become liquid.
- The exoplanet HD 189733 b, a planet with a similar size to Jupiter, is said to have a beautiful blue hue, looking something like Uranus or Neptune, but with a far more intense colour. Make no mistake, however - HD 189733 b is anything but hospitable - It's nothing short of one of the most hostile death worlds ever discovered. Orbiting its star at an incredibly close range, HD 189733 b is red hot, and its atmosphere is agitated both by the intense heat of its parent star and the planet's remarkable orbital speed of 341,000 mph, or 152 kilometres per second, generating the strongest wind speeds ever found on any planet, a whopping 8,700 km/h... but that's not all! HD 189733 b's beautiful colour hides a particularly interesting, if terrifying secret; the planet's atmosphere is laden with silica. In other words, the atmosphere is full of glass. Heated to an incredible temperature by the relentless furnace-like conditions, this glass melts, condensing into shards hurtling through the air. Anyone foolish enough to enter HD 189733 b's atmosphere would be doomed, either to incineration or being sliced into a million pieces, then promptly minced into a fine red mist by the screaming winds.
- Another weird case are planets whose atmosphere is both freaking hot and extremely high-pressure. This would result in water being stable in its solid state (better known as ice) at several hundred centigrade, so you could end up in a hailstorm that's hot enough to melt lead, or potentially rainfall that's even hotter.
- Tornadoes sometimes lift matter, which later shows up as "rain". Some of these include blood, fish, etc. The other wiki has an article of Rain of Animals and blood rain (the latter turns out not to be blood, but a type of algae).
- It has been proposed that in the far future the greenhouse effect caused by the increased Sun's luminosity, will produce thunderstorms far more powerful than the present ones as the oceans boil away and the cold trap that retains water vapor in the lower atmosphere is much higher than now, letting together with the increased heat storm clouds to develop much more than now.
- Sun showers, in which it suddenly starts raining despite not being any visible or significant clouding, are another example of this, causes can be winds carrying raindrops from miles away or a rapid condensation of humidity by cold air high above.