Its official! The hailstone from Vivian, SD is the largest ever in US history

[Jarrod Barnett]

WOW! Excellent picture Chad. Props!

Here is the official release from NOAA: http://www.crh.noaa.gov/abr/?n=stormdamagetemplate

 

[Jim Saueressig]

Thanks for bringing that to my attention, Jim. They're supposedly "in the process of taking it down", whatever that means.

I posted last night the link to your real copy and they ignored that comment and allowed a new one saying Kevin Martin helped you get the shot and the photo is still up. Classy!!

Edit: I now remember the website, It was a new project of Kevin Martins... Back to stealing photos I see. You should hammer the piss out of that fool.

KEVIN MARTIN
www.SouthernCaliforniaWeatherfraud.corn
Send Email
I am the weather guy at the Southern California Weather Authority. I enjoy weather and reporting anything in Southern California that has to do with it.

I also am the Meteorologist In Charge here at TheWeatherSpace.com

 

[Chad Cowan]

I posted last night the link to your real copy and they ignored that comment and allowed a new one saying Kevin Martin helped you get the shot and the photo is still up. Classy!!

Edit: I now remember the website, It was a new project of Kevin Martins... Back to stealing photos I see. You should hammer the piss out of that fool.

Yeah, I just found out that Kevin Martin runs that website and sent a cease and desist notification to him.

He responded with some long-winded diatribes threatening to keep stealing chasers' work until a blog about him is removed.

 

[KendraReed]

No WAY...Kevin is threatening people and their lives? Kevin is stealing **** again?! SAY IT AINT SO!!!!!

 

[Mike Smith]

Back on topic... this just came from CoCoRAHS....


The hail stone

Within the past hour, the largest fully-documented hail stone in terms
of weight (1.94 pounds) and diameter (8.0 inches) has just reached its
final resting place at the cold lab at the National Center for
Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.. Henry Reges of the CoCoRaHS
team had the honors of driving the 3rd leg of the relay that carried
this stone successfully (carefully packaged and packed in dry ice) from
the freezer of its finder in Vivian, South Dakota to the hail research
facility in Boulder. The stone is now in the hands of Dr. Charles
Knight who, interestingly, was already well established as a hail
specialist back in 1970 when the Coffeyville, Kansas record hail stone
was collected and documented.

The plans are to make a casting (mold) of this stone so that replicas
can be displayed at the Historical Museum in Lyman County, South Dakota
and at the Aberdeen, SD National Weather Service Office. We'll also be
posting some photos of the stone and its unveiling this AM in Boulder, CO.

Is this really the biggest hail stone ever to hit the U.S. -- well,
probably not. Chances are a bigger stone fell sometime and somewhere.
But the odds of capturing a stone this large and securing it intact are
very low. So if you ever have giant hail (and please know "giant" is
relative. In parts of the country anything over 2-3" is huge, up and
down the Great Plains those size stones occur fairly often and you have
to be in the 4-5" range to be really unusual. But anywhere in the
country, stones over 5" in diameter are rare and well worth documenting.

By the way, it was 31 years ago today (I may be off a day or two) that
Fort Collins was pummeled by large hail. I left town that day for a
camping trip in Wyoming and didn't find out about if for over a week.
Back then, the Denver Broncos had summer training camp here in Fort
Collins so the big news story was all the fancy football player cars
damaged by the hail. But the tragic part of the story was a local
fatality where a baby was struck and killed while their panicked mother
ran carrying the child to shelter. There were also several injuries --
some broken arms with people covering their heads. So please remember,
large hail is scary dangerous and deserves the greatest of respect.

 

[Mike Hollingshead]

WOW! Excellent picture Chad. Props!

Here is the official release from NOAA: http://www.crh.noaa.gov/abr/?n=stormdamagetemplate

Initial estimates indicate that the updraft strength in the Vivian hail storm likely ranged from 160-180 mph!

Turbulence anyone?

The 85mph gust measured by a mesonet near Draper is interesting, considering how fun that would be with baseballs or worse. The most intense wrapping of that low level circulation does seem to end just prior to that part entering Vivian. Each time I see this part on video, given the obvious precip in this area, I can't help but wonder just how bad life was in that exact area just nw of Vivian.

 

[Dean Baron]

I cant imagine the nightmare the families I saw on I90 went through. A lot of westbound traffic east of Vivian about the time it was throwing up those monsters.

 

[Mike Hollingshead]

Here is the original, taken near Platte, SD about 30 minutes after it passed over Vivian.

The gap between that structure and the storm at Vivian is probably closer to 2 hours, unless that was something happening just sw of the Vivian storm that I wasn't able to see. It's a good 80 miles straight line from Vivian to Platte. Figured it was worth noting it was a supercell for a good deal longer than 30 minutes after Vivian. Being so sparse out there and seeing the radar loop Aberdeen now has up, one really wonders what all fell from that thing. Though I guess when it got me at Chamberlain I was getting next to no hail. Just small stones WAY ahead of the base at first.

 

[GPhillips]

Does anyone have a radar image of that storm?

Not as pretty as Patrick's, but I posted this one from UDX in the Discussion thread for that day:
http://members.cox.net/gdp416/UDX_07232010_2254UTC.jpg

 

[Chad Cowan]

The gap between that structure and the storm at Vivian is probably closer to 2 hours, unless that was something happening just sw of the Vivian storm that I wasn't able to see. It's a good 80 miles straight line from Vivian to Platte. Figured it was worth noting it was a supercell for a good deal longer than 30 minutes after Vivian. Being so sparse out there and seeing the radar loop Aberdeen now has up, one really wonders what all fell from that thing. Though I guess when it got me at Chamberlain I was getting next to no hail. Just small stones WAY ahead of the base at first.

I haven't looked at any radar images that have time stamps on them but I remember reading somewhere (NWS Aberdeen site?) that Vivian got hit after 6:00, and the EXIF data on the picture says it was taken at 6:55

Date Taken: 2010-07-23 18:55:33
Camera: NIKON CORPORATION NIKON D40X
Exposure Time: 0.0333s (1/30)
Aperture: f/4
ISO: 320
Focal Length: 10mm (15mm in 35mm)

Looking at the camera right now, the time is actually ~7 minutes fast. Haven't set that thing since I bought it used a few months ago. Looking at how far it is between Vivian and Platte, these numbers aren't really adding up, but didn't the storm speed up big time after Vivian?

I know that this was the record hail producing storm because we were trying to beat this beast to our south road option to get to the storm to the south of it that dropped tornadoes that we saw from a distance. The photo is looking northwest as we were heading west. We didn't make it there before this storm did so we had to high tail it back east. Glad I didn't mess around with that core.

 

[Mike Hollingshead]

http://www.extremeinstability.com/stormpics/2010/2010_07_23_06140.jpg

That was at 6:03 as it is over Vivian.

http://www.extremeinstability.com/stormpics/2010/2010_07_23_06188.jpg

That was 7:02 from Chamberlain.

http://www.extremeinstability.com/stormpics/2010/2010_07_23_06239.jpg

That was 7:42 south of Kimball on highway 45 at pretty much the moment it was losing its supercell appearance from my view point the whole time.

That is all I know lol. For sure at 6:55 it was west of Chamberlain. It would make sense to me if your camera, like mine, is off an hour(I had to adjust these up 1hr) and that yours was at 7:55 as the Vivian storm turned east and bowed out hard. That is what I had always thought but admit I'm more lost now lol. If the time isn't off then the only other thing I come to is it was sw of the Vivian storm. But your location isn't off and that makes more sense to it being the later point of the Vivian storm then. Unless you were a lot closer to Chamberlain at that time and the view just looked different from the south more? It just always seemed to jive it was the storm at some point not long after this one posted above: http://www.extremeinstability.com/stormpics/2010/2010_07_23_06239.jpg

But for sure, got me.

 

[Jim Saueressig]

Thanks for bringing that to my attention, Jim. They're supposedly "in the process of taking it down", whatever that means.

It has someone Else's up now:

 

[David Dildine]

Unfortunately Vivian is near the outer-most reliable range ring of UDX so the lowest tilt could only sample the storm about 14,500 ft off the ground. The placemark is the approximate location of "cantalope-size" hail.

 

[Chad Cowan]

That is all I know lol. For sure at 6:55 it was west of Chamberlain. It would make sense to me if your camera, like mine, is off an hour(I had to adjust these up 1hr) and that yours was at 7:55 as the Vivian storm turned east and bowed out hard. That is what I had always thought but admit I'm more lost now lol. If the time isn't off then the only other thing I come to is it was sw of the Vivian storm. But your location isn't off and that makes more sense to it being the later point of the Vivian storm then. Unless you were a lot closer to Chamberlain at that time and the view just looked different from the south more? It just always seemed to jive it was the storm at some point not long after this one posted above: http://www.extremeinstability.com/stormpics/2010/2010_07_23_06239.jpg

But for sure, got me.

You nailed it. Forgot to set the camera's clock forward for DST, eek. The picture was actually taken about 1.5-2 hours after the storm passed over Vivian. Sorry for the mix up, everyone.

 

[Jim Saueressig]

Kevin had to replace the pic again, now yet another is up:

And now he is grabbing theories from around and passing them as his own. Get a Life kevin. It's obvious you are trolling here.

A theory that has been worked on at TheWeatherSpace.com by Meteorologist Kevin Martin since July 24th may explain why some hailstones are large like in Aurora and Vivian. The theory comes from looking at the systems around the main producer.

"I decided to look back at the radar images and compare the surrounding area, the way the jet was moving, and how it interacted with the local storm environment", said Martin. "I believe hailstones of greater size like Vivian, SD and Aurora, NE are not generated by one single storm, but multiple updrafts."

Martin states that his theory cannot fully be proven and it is just a hypothesis at the moment.

According to the theory, hailstones in both hail events in 2003 and 2010 were found on the tail-end system out of a cluster of three very powerful thunderstorms. If Martin's theory is correct, a select few may actually jump from one updraft to the other, which would explain why a few only make it to the larger size while others in the same updraft are 1/2 the size.