Hello Gene, thanks for the response, and here are three more questions:
1. For the "great 40,000 high foot supercells" did they have lower bases than the "dumpy 65,000 ft supercells"?
Not necessarily, storm tops in general are irrelevant to the kind of severe weather that can be produced. For example, in a tropical regime very strong instability (CAPE) can lead to strong updrafts taking storm tops to 65,000 feet. If there is no shear or winds aloft these storm can go up and fall down even faster producing brief strong winds. Their lifecycle of being photogenic is pretty short. That said, new storms can develop of the outflow boundaries off the old storms and the lightning can be great. This is common with the summer monsoon storms from AZ, NM and northward. In non tropical environments like early spring most of the severe storms are in the 40,000 foot range. This is because of the much stronger winds shearing the tops off and the lower instability often found that time of the year. Still, these storms can produce large hail and tornadoes.
2. Were the "dumpy 65,000 ft supercells" storms you observed through most of their development and maturity cycle? So, were they perhaps more impressive earlier before weakening, or did they never really get their act together despite the height?
Getting their act together as you say depends much upon the available shear, given that the instability is already in place.
There is one way to correlate strong storms with big tops. Look at the sounding .....from the LCL a level of free convection can be calculated. The area to the left of this line is the positive area or CAPE. Somewhere "up there" this line will cross back over the environmental temperature, say at 46,000 feet. That line is often where the anvil is located, it's the equilibrium level or EL. The area above this level is where the "overshooting top" is located. It's possible to calculate the expected height of this overshoot, anything beyond that is noteworthy to say the least. In my early chase days I always had these numbers in my hip pocket. Any storm that blew through these levels needed special attention. In some cases I picked a storm based on how high it went over the overshooting top calculations. Now of course we have Doppler and this methodology is not needed.
Still today, if we have an EL of 46,000 feet, an overshooting top of 53,000 feet and you see a storm topping out at 59,000 it's likely to be exceptionally severe compared to the others because of the stronger updraft.
3.Did the higher storms produce more hail? Don't they tend to?
Again, it depends where they are. A 65,000 foot storm in Panama will likely not produce hail, but one in Texas or South Dakota that has shear has a good chance of producing hail. I've seen some very big hail out from 45,000 foot tops. The old record setting Coffeyville, KS supercell that produced 6.5 inch hail was 58,000 feet. I'm not sure how high the Aurora, Nebraska storm was when it produced its record setting hail in 2003.
