My favorite weather experience was the day we had a hundred degree increase in temps in 24 hours. I don't remember now what the temperatures were, but one day we were freezing in our parkas at way below zero, and the next morning I put on my parka and went out and it hit the 50s or 60s above zero, and everybody was shedding their parkas and showing sweatstains on their shirts. Unbelievable. Winter one day, summer the next. The standing joke was that spring was one day long. We skipped it that year.

It flooded, of course, since the snow was melting like crazy.

The Air Force was very good at survival training, on an off topic note. I had survival training for ditching at sea (I was a Minuteman Missile Combat Crew Member, and we never flew), for jungle survival (no jungles in North Dakota), and for winter survival (bingo!). I was at Camp Pendleton watching the Marine jungle survival training before they shipped to Vietnam - it was about 30 minutes of a guy eating a snake raw and killing a bunny with a karate chop to the back of its head, then skinning and gutting it. One of my fellow ROTC cadets asked why we got such good training and the Marines got so little since they'd actually be out there, and the answer was, "They'll never be in a survival situation." Gulp.