V2 2009 Last Chase Photos
I have finally gotten around to getting my photos off my camera from our last chase on Saturday June 13. I believe I have mentioned that the day was not looking very promising once we got our balloon data from our launch early in the afternoon. The atmosphere was really capped where any type of air motion upward would be put to a halt. The cap finally broke somewhat late in the afternoon and we had some storms to obtain data on. We were a good 60 miles from the initial storm development as we were located in Channing, TX. The storms had initated just northwest of Amarillo, TX. NSSL2 had to stop on US 287 to let the western edge of the storm pass us by. There was very heavy rain and pea sized hail. This is what the sky looked like as the storm approached.
The initial surge quickly passed and we continued on. It turns out this was not the Armada’s target for this day as a new stronger cell developed. We drove eastward to intercept and launch a radiosonde. We were not quite sure if this storm was classified as a supercell or not, but it sure was impressive looking from behind it. This was a very intense bubbling updraft at this point.
National Weather Service radar was indicating reflectivity of nearly 75 dBZ when I took the photos above. This high of a reflectivity means hail is falling. After our first post-storm launch, we drove east to catch up with the storm to prepare for our next launch. However, the storm was collapsing rapidly. Several vehicles closer to the storm were reporting seeing blue skies right near where the highest reflectivities where showing up on radar. About 10 minutes later, operations were called off on this storm. We stayed at our launch site for a few minutes because we saw some really interesting hail stones in the grass. Remember, the pictures above with the bubbling clouds was over this location about 15 minutes ago so the hail was on the ground a good amount of time and not at its original size when it first hit the ground.
I measure this stone to be nearly 1.5 inches in diameter.
Stones the size of quarters. Note the one on the left has a clear outer edge with a white center. I will explain what this means shortly..
Another stone nearly quarter sized with a clear outer edge and white center.
This stone was nickel sized but had rings in it with clear and white.
So why does the hail look like this? Hail stones grow inside the thunderstorm. They grow inside the thunderstorm updraft. These updrafts can be extremely fast (Speeds exceeding 100 mph) so the hail has trouble falling down so it will be tumbling and hitting other stones. The tumbling and hitting other stones is apart of a theory on how lightning is caused but I will not get into that. Inside the updraft there are layers of the atmopshere that are more saturated then others. The drier layers will be more white and less dense as there is less moisture available to form the hail stone. The more saturated layers will appear clear and will be much denser. So as the hail begins to grow it gets lifted into different layers with different amounts of moisture hense the rings and different looks to the stones. The more ragged looking stones means the hail was tumbling inside the updraft.
On our drive to our final hotel stay during V2, there was an awesome sunset..
I will be continuing to blog over the coming days. I have some neat things to share and will post some final thoughts on the experience of a lifetime so keep checking back!
