Meteorologists have to say things like 'partly cloudy' with a straight face while the atmosphere is out here doing all of this. Fourteen weather events that make the forecast look boring on purpose.

In Yoro, Honduras, locals report that it rains fish — regularly enough that the town throws an annual festival for it.

The Lluvia de Peces has been reported since the 1800s, with small fish found flopping on the ground after intense storms. The leading explanation is waterspouts or floodwaters sweeping fish inland, though no one has caught the sky in the act.

Ball lightning — glowing orbs that drift through the air and sometimes through walls — was dismissed as folklore until scientists accidentally recorded one.

In 2012, Chinese researchers studying ordinary lightning in Qinghai captured a ball of light on camera and spectrograph, showing it contained vaporized soil elements. The finding, published in 2014, supported one theory, but how ball lightning works is still genuinely debated.

The largest storm ever recorded was nearly half the width of the continental United States.

Typhoon Tip, in October 1979, spanned roughly 1,380 miles across — a circulation that would stretch from Dallas to New York — and also set the record for the lowest sea-level pressure ever measured, 870 millibars. Reconnaissance aircraft flew into it dozens of times to take its measurements.

The hottest air temperature ever officially recorded is 134°F (56.7°C) — at Death Valley in 1913.

The WMO still lists the Furnace Creek reading as the world record, but some weather historians argue the 1913 observation was botched and that Death Valley's modern 130°F readings are the real ceiling. Either way, the hottest place on Earth is a valley in California.

It snows in the Sahara.

The Algerian town of Aïn Séfra, on the desert's northern edge, has been dusted several times in recent decades — including a 2018 fall that draped the dunes in white and produced photos that look Photoshopped but aren't. Cold air spilling over the Atlas Mountains occasionally meets just enough moisture to frost the world's largest hot desert.

Thundersnow is exactly what it sounds like: a full thunderstorm, except it's snowing.

It's rare because snowstorms usually lack the instability lightning needs, and when it happens the snow muffles the thunder so you can only hear it within a few miles. Meteorologists on live TV tend to lose their composure over it, understandably.

In 2001, red rain fell on the Indian state of Kerala for weeks.

Early speculation ran from desert dust to alien microbes, but the official investigation traced the color to airborne spores of a local Trentepohlia alga. Blood-tinted rain also falls in Europe when Saharan dust hitches a ride on storm systems.

The heaviest hailstone on record weighed 1.02 kilograms — about as much as a pineapple.

It fell in Gopalganj, Bangladesh, in April 1986, during a hailstorm that killed 92 people. That remains the deadliest and heaviest-hail event officially recognized.

The fastest surface wind gust ever measured outside a tornado was 253 mph — and nobody knew for 14 years.

Cyclone Olivia lashed Australia's Barrow Island in 1996, but the anemometer record wasn't verified by the WMO until 2010, dethroning Mount Washington's famous 231 mph gust from 1934. The instrument survived; the record books needed updating.

Cherrapunji, India, once recorded over 86 feet of rain in a single 12-month span.

Between August 1860 and July 1861, about 26,470 millimeters fell — still the record for a year of rain anywhere on Earth. Neighboring Mawsynram holds the crown for highest average annual rainfall today.

Parts of Chile's Atacama Desert have weather stations that have never recorded rain.

The driest nonpolar desert on Earth averages around a millimeter of rain per year in its core, and some spots appear to have gone decades to centuries without measurable precipitation. When rare rains do arrive, the desert erupts into carpets of flowers.

Every autumn, a cloud shaped like a thousand-kilometer rolling pin appears over Australia's Gulf of Carpentaria.

The Morning Glory cloud is a rare roll cloud that can stretch hundreds of kilometers and moves like a slow wave through the sky. Glider pilots travel to Burketown specifically to surf it.

Spearfish, South Dakota, once warmed 49 degrees Fahrenheit in two minutes.

On January 22, 1943, a chinook wind slammed the temperature from −4°F to 45°F between 7:30 and 7:32 a.m., the fastest recorded temperature swing in history. Car windshields reportedly cracked from the thermal shock.

The 2018 Carr Fire in California generated a genuine fire tornado.

The rotating column of flame near Redding packed winds above 143 mph — equivalent to an EF-3 tornado — making it one of the strongest fire-generated vortices ever documented. Wildfires, it turns out, can build their own weather.

Honorable mention to every forecast that has ever said 'chance of showers' when the atmosphere's actual range includes fish.