Freaks of the Storm: From Flying Cows to Stealing Thunder: The World's Strangest True Weather Stories [Paperback]

In the course of his numerous talks and presentations to college and grade school students, civic clubs, and nursing homes, climatologist Randy Cerveny found that people of all ages are fascinated by the unusual -- and he seized on that fascination to tell them about strange weather. Now, in his first book, the rest of us can learn of real, documented stories such as these: Odd occurrences of chickens losing all their feathers during tornadoes (so-called chicken plucking ); Strange stories of finding lightning victims who have been completely stripped of all of their clothes (through a process known as the vapor effect ); Weird stories of how past powerful hailstorms have both led to the ending of one war -- and the complete prevention of another; Bizarre uses of weather -- such as the strange contraption called a windwagon that literally sailed nearly 500 miles from Kansas to Colorado; Each chapter in Freaks of the Storm encompasses the oddities of a specific type of weather, such as tornadoes, hurricanes, lightning, and hail. The author also divides specific conditions into a set of categories associated with the overall phenomena.A contributing editor of the popular national weather magazineWeatherwise,Dr. Randy Cervenyis a professor who specializes in weather and climate at Arizona State University, where he is one of four professors out of a faculty of 1,700 honored with the title of President's Professor. He has studied weather on all seven of the world's continents.

His research has ranged from studying the weather associated with prison escapes to computing the weather of the next 10,000 years (used in the design of the nuclear waste depository at Yucca Mountain). For his research demonstrating that it rains more on weekends than on weekdays, the BBC, CNN, ABC News, NPR and others interviewed him, and he has appeared live on the NBCTodayshow and on the CBSMorning Show.

His research has been discussed in suclC–