Australia Has Been Having A Scary Summer

Lightning strikes Sydney, Australia's airport Friday.

It's been quite a summer in Australia, with terrible storms, extreme heat, wildfires, and you name it.

As we all know, it's summer in the Southern Hemisphere, which makes it severe weather season in that part of the world.

The United States is king of the world,  I think, when it comes to extreme summer weather, with tornadoes, hail, flash floods, drought and wildfires.

We've already gotten tastes of the spring severe weather season early this year, as there have been several episode of of tornadic weather in the United States this month, most recently last night around San Antonio, Texas. 

But Australia probably ranks a close second in that worldwide severe weather category, and this summer Down Under has been pretty wild, even by Australian severe weather standards.

The latest blow came this weekend in Sydney, where enormous hailstones fell. Even in places around the Sydney metro area where the hail wasn't enormous - baseball sized at least - there was so much hail that it accumulated to pretty incredible depths.

Especially where rain water washed it into low spots where it collected.  As you might expect, there was widespread damage to cars, buildings and gardens with all that hail. Flash flooding in some spots worsened the problem.

Lots of hail accumulated in Sydney, Australia this weekend.

The storm was accompanied by a huge number of lightning strikes.  There were widespread power failures and train shut downs because of the lightning. Sydney's airport also closed for a time.

The big Sydney storms comes just after record heat sizzled much of Australia last week.

The heat contibuted to numerous bush fires, many of which are still burning, especially in areas not strongly affected by the storms that hit around Sydney.

As always, there's video of the storms.

Here's a video of hail up to the size of baseballs crashing down on a Sydney area yard:





Actually, this is Australia, so they went gaga over the fact the hailstones were "fockin cricket ball sized" (NSFW for language in this video.)


This video includes time lapses of the storm rolling into Sydney and lightning striking many areas. Of course, hail, too.