Skulls, evil smileys and faces screaming in horror sometimes made meteorologists tremble behind their computer screens. In celebration of Halloween, Futura offers you an anthology of the most frightening weather phenomena of recent years.

Many entirely natural weather phenomena appear supernatural to inexperienced observers, such as: chunk spectrumshe pillars of lightthe moon crown, the white rainbow or even the skypunch. But the weather can also appear paranormal on satellite imagery and sometimes on weather forecast models.

Hurricane Matthews Skull

Ranked #1 on the scariest faces in satellite imagery, the famous skull and crossbones from Hurricane Matthew, captured off the coast of Haiti on October 4, 2016. These colorful images from NASA come from a video showing the tumble of this hurricane his eye : All it took was a still image and a photo capture, perfectly timed, by a meteorologist at the American Weather Channel, and that image went viral.

The white dots that look like the skull’s teeth are probably thunderstorms. This chilling snap heralded a disastrous sequel: Hurricane Matthew reached Category 5 (maximum) with wind speeds of 260 km/h and devastated several islands. Unfortunately, it has planted death in its path and claimed more than 600 lives, the vast majority in Haiti.

The screaming face of France’s heatwave

During the historic heatwave of June 2019, even the weather models seemed to lose their heads in the face of such high temperatures. This screenshot of the GFS model from the website weather shows the heat expected a week later, on June 27, 2019.

The screaming face that appears on the map is oddly reminiscent of that of the picture by Edvard Munch, The Scream. The meteorologists probably actually let out a scream when they saw this predicted heat by model: Finally, 27 June 2019 was the hottest day recorded for a month in June in the period 1900-2019 in France, with a national average temperature of 27.9°C (i.e. 8.6°C above normal). ).

The next day, June 28, 2019, the absolute heat record in France was also broken with 46 °C Verargues in the Herault. There was actually enough to scream in horror! The eyes and mouth of the face are actually delineated as the hottest areas in France that day, using the temperature forecast at 1,500 meters above sea level.

The evil smiley of two tropical phenomena

The 2020 hurricane season was marked by a record number of phenomena : 31 total, including 14 hurricanes. On September 22, 2020, NOAA satellite imagery between the North Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico showed two eyes and a huge smile underneath.

It is actually Tropical Depression Beta, stretching from Texas to Florida in the United States and Hurricane Teddy on the Canadian coast. Between the two, the smile is actually a front (a disturbance) created by the instability of the two phenomena. Beta brought heavy rain and flooding to the southern United States. Hurricane Teddy, on the other hand, reached Category 4 with winds of 220 km/h at sea before creating strong waves along the West Indies and Canada.

Due to clouds, but also satellite images and maps from forecast models, the weather is one of the main sources pareidolia Visuals, our brain’s ability to recognize human faces anywhere.