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Spring severe weather chatter


Ian

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Meh. All severe is local. Pretty much a non-event in my part of Balt City. It rained.

 

yeah, i didn't get anything super exciting either. all the heavier cells missed me east and west. just some rain and thunder for a few hours. i think i got around .6

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The warm front probably acted as a great forcing mechanism for those cells yesterday.  Then the transition to the heavy rainfall after nightfall was classic for the Mid Atlantic.  Even up at home in PA the cells quickly fired, tried to go severe then dumped. 

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Interesting that LWX in their afternoon discussion explicitly talked down any large hail threat, and we ended up with one of the best hail days I've seen here in 20 years. They mentioned mid-level warming evident in early afternoon ACARS profiles; I have to think that widespread ascent with the arriving trough cooled the mid-levels back down. It's too bad that they didn't get an evening balloon launched so that we could see - I'm assuming that a storm overhead prevented it.

Their afd is kind of lol in retrospect but it's also hard to say that a handful of supercells will develop over the DC area most of the time. Bulk shear always looked good but if you don't get a supercell you don't get giant hail. I didn't even really consider the hail threat that much myself partly because it's not that common here. I mean you get a cell to go nuts somewhere in the region most years but supercell days are like a 1-2 times a year thing in the larger several state area.
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The warm front probably acted as a great forcing mechanism for those cells yesterday. Then the transition to the heavy rainfall after nightfall was a class transition for the Mid Atlantic. Even up at home in PA the cells quickly fired, tried to go severe then dumped.

And further we usually suck at warm front stuff. Much more common to see that out west.
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When I was driving from Olney to Rockville I had a nice view of the sky. The cell that dumped the hail looked impressive but didn't really have the classic super cell structure. It was developing quick though and became rather ominous right before the rain hit.

I'll never forget the noise and raining shredded leaves. Cars stopped in their tracks. Lots of panicked faces. I might have had one myself...lol. I'm absolutely kicking myself for not taking a video. I was too awestruck to think about grabbing my phone for a video. Doh.

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I've raised my kids right. They collected a bunch of hail and put it in the freezer. lol

 

post-2035-0-98019700-1462288793_thumb.jp

 

 

ETA: It's probably obvious but just in case, the big pieces are clumps that froze together in the freezer and didn't fall from the sky like that. If they did I would be in the middle of a massive insurance claim...haha

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And further we usually suck at warm front stuff. Much more common to see that out west.

Totally agree.  I checked all of the SPC hail reports for DC Metro and found about 620 of them since 1955.  Of that, only 22 were at or above 2" in diameter.  This translated to less than 3% of any hail report in the DC region being that large.  Really a surprise day for sure.  

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2.42" in the gauge

2.5" hail. Lots of branches and leaves . Shredded from the hail.

Quite the evening here in Rockville. Few neighbor's cars have minor dents.

64 and muggy

 

What a difference from not far away in Germantown -- we got 0.6" of rain and no hail, for which I am glad.  I been in baseball sized hail before (Orlando FL, 1992) and don't want to ever see it again!  My car had $thousands of damage.  People lost multiple home windows, and pool area screens were shredded.

 

From yesterday, my sister in Huntingtown, Calvert Co has little dents all over her new car.  Not happy!

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What a difference from not far away in Germantown -- we got 0.6" of rain and no hail, for which I am glad.  I been in baseball sized hail before (Orlando FL, 1992) and don't want to ever see it again!  My car had $thousands of damage.  People lost multiple home windows, and pool area screens were shredded.

 

From yesterday, my sister in Huntingtown, Calvert Co has little dents all over her new car.  Not happy!

We got a little rain and 60mph wind gusts, branches all over. I am very very glad we got no hail. Some folks nearby did, they were not happy about cracks in their windshields. We were damn lucky.

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Slightly off topic, earlier in the day I noticed gravity waves on the vis satellite across the area before the thunderstorms popped up when the area was clearing out from being overcast. Would the presence of them possibly helped to intensify or explain the unexpected nature of the thunderstorms yesterday?

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When I was driving from Olney to Rockville I had a nice view of the sky. The cell that dumped the hail looked impressive but didn't really have the classic super cell structure. It was developing quick though and became rather ominous right before the rain hit.

I'll never forget the noise and raining shredded leaves. Cars stopped in their tracks. Lots of panicked faces. I might have had one myself...lol. I'm absolutely kicking myself for not taking a video. I was too awestruck to think about grabbing my phone for a video. Doh.

It didn't look too much like a supercell overall, perhaps it wasn't in full. Was a left split off the other supercell and there were probably 2-3 other legit supercells during the evening. Can see it was lofting big dbz tho either way.

 

qyyuTjo.png

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Where does yesterday compare to some of our other severe weather days?

hard to say.. most svr metrics are report based so they don't necessarily guage well as we see increasing reports with time because more people report. i do think 'supercell days' around here are like a 1-3 times per year thing in the DC/Balt focused mid-atlantic ... but at any one spot considerably less frequent.

 

i actually have a map of hail max by county I made a while back but totally forgot last night. I'll have to pull it up when I get home. We did see giant hail in northern MD last year.

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The CWG article for posterity: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2016/05/03/how-mondays-thunderstorms-unloaded-tennis-ball-size-hail-in-the-d-c-area/

 

This is probably the event of the summer, unfortunately.  

 

Your probably right. Not much summer left to sneak in a good event. 

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Between 520pm and 6pm yesterday I was outside helping the neighbor mow her backyard, which had a foot of grass. We watched that storm to our NW start from a single harmless cumulus, grow into a storm that got darker and darker and darker. It started spitting lightning. We got done just in time as a dark cloud edged over us from the WNW. There was some rain, not much, but what this storm did to us was rake us with high winds. Branches started falling all over! One narrowly missed smashing one of the neighbor's car windshields! Very very thankful we got none of that destructive hail that fell farther north.

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I've raised my kids right. They collected a bunch of hail and put it in the freezer. lol

hail1.JPG

ETA: It's probably obvious but just in case, the big pieces are clumps that froze together in the freezer and didn't fall from the sky like that. If they did I would be in the middle of a massive insurance claim...haha

Bob, with hail that size there is no doubt you have damage to the roof. Unless you have a high impact resistant shingle. Any metal vents or flashings are dented. The hail divots on the roof will become more noticeable after the gravel washes out over the next month or so. I was just on a roof today in South Manassas. right where the Woodbridge hail event started at the very beginning. The hail was smaller than what you are showing and there was still significant roof damage.

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Slightly off topic, earlier in the day I noticed gravity waves on the vis satellite across the area before the thunderstorms popped up when the area was clearing out from being overcast. Would the presence of them possibly helped to intensify or explain the unexpected nature of the thunderstorms yesterday?

I've noticed that too.  Could be it's proximity to the surface warm front. 

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Bob, with hail that size there is no doubt you have damage to the roof. Unless you have a high impact resistant shingle. Any metal vents or flashings are dented. The hail divots on the roof will become more noticeable after the gravel washes out over the next month or so. I was just on a roof today in South Manassas. right where the Woodbridge hail event started at the very beginning. The hail was smaller than what you are showing and there was still significant roof damage.

 

I'm going to go up there and take a look around. Upon closer inspection there are 5 dents on the roof of my wife's car. Which sucks. I've kept that car completely mint since we bought it 2 years ago. I'm officially anti-hail imby now. 

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It didn't look too much like a supercell overall, perhaps it wasn't in full. Was a left split off the other supercell and there were probably 2-3 other legit supercells during the evening. Can see it was lofting big dbz tho either way.

 

 

 

I love those graphics. That's exactly what it looked like in the sky. During approach the top of the storm clouds were out in front and they were dark but high altitude. Didn't look intimidating at all. There wasn't a shelf or line underneath either. At least where I could see anyways. Wasn't much wind with it either. For as nasty as the hail was, the storm didn't pack much of a punch  in the wind/lightning dept.

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