My Experiences with Supercell Storms

[Evo]

I seem to attract these, the worst of which was baseball sized hail that only hit my neighborhood a few years ago.

I was in the kitchen tonight when I heard thunder and saw that a black cloud was directly over me and nowhere else, there was blue sky all around.

I kept telling T_E that I was being hit by supercell storms directly over me. He thought I was nuts. I turned on the tv and all broadcasts were reporting the freak supercell storms which the weatherman said "unbelievably these are appearing to be no more than two blocks wide".

Hmmmph!

Unfortunately all tv broadcasting tonight is pre-empted for weather and Medium won't be shown.

Anyone else live in an area of freak storms?

 

[Cyrus]

See what you did to the space shuttle

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/main/index.html

 

[Astronuc]

See what you did to the space shuttle

You mean - http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/multimedia/117_gallery-hail.html.

Anyone else live in an area of freak storms?

Once in a while, we get an intense storm. Several years ago, we had a supercell hit the area. Trees were ripped and splintered, house roofs damaged by wind, trees and branches fell into houses. The extreme damage was in a narrow band about 200 feet wide a few miles long, but either side of there was very little damage. The cell was headed toward our house, but it stopped the other side of the ridge just to the west of us. We were very lucky.

Other than that we have not had a direct hit. I have driven into storms in West Texas. They didn't look like much from a distance, but once I got into it, I basically could see outside the windshield.

About 30 years ago, I was with friends on the beach in Galveston when a heavy squal hit. The rain stung us with about 40 mph winds. We could not see anything but the sand we were standing on.

Evo, I think you live in 'tornado alley', which stretches from W. Texas to Minnesota and Wisconsin.

 

[Schrodinger's Dog]

Our weathers usually mild, although in 1990 we got a tropical storm of some serious magnitude that lasted for quite a few days, at times winds gusted to 166 mph, that's as much as I want to see of extreme weather and I'm thankfull our country is quiet on the tennis ball sized hail stones as well, largest I've seen are probably the size of small marbles. The world record Hailstones were nearly as big as soccer balls, imagine that

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/mai...nd07.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/11/07/ixworld.html

According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the heaviest hailstones on record weighed up to 2.2lb and killed 92 people in Bangladesh in 1986.

2.2lbs is a kilo!