'tis the season

for starters, it looks like i (dave) will be the sole poster to this blog, so unless any entry says otherwise, you can assume that it's me.

late this afternoon i managed to capture some good radar images of a splitting supercell in central texas. the shear profile favoured the right mover, and it didn't disappoint. the right mover of the pair continued, and the left mover dissipated. as the storms were at their peak, the spc got a report of 4 and a quarter inch diameter hail--that's just over 10 cm!! when we're out on our chase, i hope we don't run into that--softball-sized hail can ruin vehicles and stop a chase.
the largest hail i've ever seen was about this size, back in july of 2001. i was amazed that the hail didn't smash the windshield, but it didn't. blind luck, i suppose.

as for last night's convection just south of the border, it seems i was right. there wasn't enough low-level moisture to produce tornadoes, although there was one point in the evening where there might have been. it was this time that i also managed to capture on radar, last night. thunderstorms developed rapidly in the warm sector just north of fargo, and moved northward. just to the south of grand forks, the storms intersected a warm front or an outflow boundary--i'll leave it for you to decide what it was--and at that point, one of the storms had that look to it. the kidney bean, hook echo look. but it only had it for one or two scans of the radar.

now, i'm not saying that it had a tornado down at that time, but if it were possible at all during the storm's lifetime, it was possible then. at the very least, it was likely very visually impressive. to boot, there was no rotation evident from the doppler images i had available to me. but then again, if there was a tight circulation, you never know....

so look for those radar images, both of today's texas supercell split, and of yesterday's storm-warm front interaction, in the science area of weather central soon.