Though a rare phenomena, that’s the power of a heat burst. Imagine waking up at midnight to find the temperature has shot up 20 degrees in minutes and 80 mph wind gusts have ravaged your town. Hurricane Irwin on the left collided with Hurricane Hilary on the right the two merged before fading out over the ocean. GOES-16 satellite imagery over the eastern Pacific Ocean from July 25 to August 1, 2017. But often, the effect is additive when hurricanes come together - we usually end up with one massive storm instead of two smaller ones. Two storms closer in strength can gravitate towards each other until they reach a common point and merge, or merely spin each other around for a while before shooting off on their own paths. If one hurricane is a lot stronger than the other, the smaller one will orbit it and eventually come crashing into its vortex to be absorbed. When two hurricanes spinning in the same direction pass close enough to each other, they begin an intense dance around their common center. Virga is commonly seen in the Western U.S., desert climates, and other dry areas. A picture of virga taken at Rio Del Mar Beach in Aptos, CA.

Great storms could be raging above your head, but the only trace you’ll see are the thin wisps of virga drifting through the sky.

It shows up on radar as a typical rain or snow shower, but there’s no evidence of that at the surface. That cold air may then sink very quickly and dump a dangerously concentrated parcel of air and water/hail in a microburst.īut for the most part, virga is a visual effect. The evaporation process takes a lot of energy out of the surrounding air and causes it to cool. What’s left are feathery streaks extending from the cloud’s base, capturing the path the rain or ice took before becoming water vapor. When the air beneath a cloud is very dry, precipitation falling through it evaporates before reaching Earth’s surface. Virga is ghostly precipitation that never makes it to the ground. Haboobs, Sun Dogs, Virga, Halos! Do you believe these are all words that describe various weather and atmospheric phenomena? Ever wonder about the ghostly precipitation that never makes it to the ground or on a summer night you wake up and the temperature has gone up 20 degrees in minutes or tornadoes over water or long pillars of multicolored light streaking the sky?

Wierd phenomena