Tell Of Your Personal Experience:
Are you familiar with SuperStorm '93? Take a look at the storm summary to learn all the details and statistics about how truly powerful this storm system was. Did you experience the SuperStorm? Were you one of the millions of people without power, or perhaps stranded in your car along some interstate? If you were, write a paragraph describing your experience so that those around you who didn't can see the storm through your eyes. Tell about how this storm affected the life of yourself and your family.

If you didn't experience the storm, think about some other memorable weather event that touched your life. Perhaps it was a tornado, or a hurricane, or maybe even flooding rains that made water back up through the drain pipes of the wash tub in the basement. Below is a couple paragraphs of an experience I can remember as if it was yesterday.

Photograph courtesy of NOAA

The Morning The Sky Turned Green:
I'll never forget how dark it was one morning when I woke up to go to school. I must've been 13. I think it was the constant rumbling of thunder that woke me up anyway. Normally the house is filled with sunlight, or at least bright enough to see where I was going, but not on this day.

I got up and walked into my parents room and saw my mother staring out the window. I went over and stood next to her and was amazed by what I saw. I swear, the sky was almost as green as the grass in the yard. Lightning was flashing like a strobe light and the thunder was almost non-stop. Every minute or so the thunder seemed to shake the very foundation of the house. The pictures rocked from side to side, glasses in rattled against each other and the TV would alternate between weather updates and static.

Five minutes later it hailed like crazy. It sounded as if someone dropped a giant bag of marbles on our house, quickly covering the yard with millions of tiny white spheres. The noise on the rooftop was so loud that I thought for sure it would collapse at any moment. I was pretty scared. This lasted for a minute or two, but seemed like a lifetime and then stopped as suddenly as it began. So quickly it was over. The sky returned to gray, no longer green, and the thunder and lightning stopped. All I could see was a gentle rain striking the puddles in the flooded streets.

Written by: Steve Hall

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Terms for using data resources. CD-ROM available. Credits and Acknowledgments for WW2010. Department of Atmospheric Sciences (DAS) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

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