There is very little substitute for spending lots of time in your lab, so that you notice the tiny shifts in mechanical sounds that indicate a change in the health of an instrument.
Same thing for me. I was having brunch in Pacifica and when I headed back to San Francisco, I saw this weird cloud where it shouldn't be. It was an otherwise clear day and it was blowing backwards, towards the ocean, due to whatever the Northern California equivalent of a Santa Ana wind is.
Not making it up, this is exactly what we thought when the Oakland Hills fire of 1991 started. Our confusion was short-lived, I'm sad to say.