Lack of Severe Hail in Kansas on 5/4 and 5/5 ?

[Dick McGowan]

I was talking with a few other chasers about this subject and noticed that I never once saw a hail stone all weekend that was larger than a golfball. Granted, we weren't ever near the hail cores except for the end of the day of 5/5. We actually had no choice but to drive north into the hail core. There was a wedge tornado that we were trailing to our due west/southwest and we were starting to lose visibility very quickly and could either: 1. Drive west into the tornado 2. Chance turning around and driving back south into the area of interest, blindfolded. 3. Take a flooded mud road east and risk getting stuck in the road and be in danger again. 4. Punch north from the hook into the hail core at a high rate of speed and risk losing our windshield. We chose option #4. I was surprised that the hail was no larger than a golfball, and those were only sporadic. We drove through the hail core all the way to Great Bend, and never once were in danger of losing our windshield.

Looking back on SPC's report page for 5/5/07 there are only 2 reports (that I can see) in Kansas...and are 2.75 a piece. I guess I would have just expected this at least in each of the supercells in Kansas all day. The last time I checked SPC's mesoanalysis at around 2 pm that day, it looked like there was a good amount of instability as well as very steep low to mid level lapse rates. So my question is, why weren't there more reports of severe hail? I don't even think I recall seeing any of the cells on GR level 3, which is never right, indicating more than 2.00 all day.

 

[Van DeWald]

The same thing happened with the Hallam, NE storm in May 2004. There was large hail (baseball) that it occurred, but it became second fiddle to the F4 tornado. There actually was quite a bit of flooding for the Hallam storm too, but that again was a much lower priority.

 

[Skip Talbot]

I felt the opposite about both days. On May 4 we scraped a severe hail core (got up to 1 inch before we backed off) trying to get to another supercell, and on May 5 we were dodging cores with VIL's over 70. On low CAPE days and marginal setups I don't have a problem core punching small storms, but I was extremely careful on both of these days to stay out of the cores.

 

[Shane Adams]

We didn't see any hail all weekend, by design. Chasing with a sunroof tends to change your attitude about sampling hailcores

 

[Adam Atkins]

FWIW I broke my windshield on 5/4...southwest of Woodward, OK. BUT the thread focus' on Kansas... GR LVL II data has an algorithm (hail mesh) that plots hail swaths, not positive whether it estimates size...

 

[Brian Stertz]

I was amazed as we moved into Great Bend in the typical hailcore zone and we only got dimes and a few quarters/half dollars. Should have had grapefruits where we were with respect to the updraft. That small hail size surprise was refreshing but certainly a bit odd. The same trend continued that night on the later Seward KS area tornadic supercell. They were prolific rain producers though !!

 

[Charles Kuster]

We also did not experience any hail during that weekend. I also would have thought instability was high enough to produce at least a few larger hail reports. Maybe spotters and/or chasers did not experience the largest hail that actually fell on those days??

 

[Marcus Opitz]

I only saw at most, quarter sized hail as we got very close to hoisington, ks...I have noticed that GRlvl3 can tend to overestimate hail size with respect to reports, ect...I suppose to could understimate as well as any other program that uses various "parameters". Nothing compares to the eyes (and dents) in the field..

 

[Jim Tang]

I could see why hail size wouldn't have been gigantic on the 5th.

There had already been an earlier round of convection in the area, and the second round of more potent supercells fired pretty much all at once. Therefore, the instability was already slightly lessened, and the storm competition would've ensured that not one single updraft could become too powerful. Also, I suspect that when a tornado is on the ground, the tornado takes some of the energy that was before available for the updraft.

 

[Mike Hollingshead]

A friend noted large hail on the nc KS supercell on the 4th, which broke his sunroof. He commented how there were very few stones in the heavy rain, but the ones that were there were large. I wasn't far behind punching the core and didn't have anything large at all. That was on the punch north, then on the following punch east I encounted no hail.

 

[afischer]

On May 5 I did a relatively "safe" corepunch (oxymoron?) just west of Stafford at ~525pm, with a steady-state and briefly tornadic wall cloud visible to my south through the hook rain... and all I got were some rogue half-inch stones.

May 4 I didn't see any hail at all in the damage swath south of Greensburg. Maybe the larger hail was farther north, nearer the 183-54 intersection.