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Thursday, May 28, 2015

A Weather Event

This is Steven Petrick posting.

Last night was locally interesting, depending on where you lived.

Looking at the weather radar, a town south of Canyon was pummeled by the weather in that for more than a hour or so the pattern appeared stalled. That is to say you could see the weather moving into the town's location, but then breaking up and dissipating as it tried to move north of the town. This continued for over an hour (and was in place before I saw the radar), and as that cell seemed stalled, other storms appeared to be moving past Canyon from the south to east.

For a while it seemed as if Canyon would not be hit. Looking out my front window, I could see a "light show," that is lots of lightning strikes, going on beginning in the south, and moving to the east heading north.

It did not last.

A cell finally seemed to move up I-27 (as if following the road) until it hit Canyon.

The initial rain was fairly heavy, then got heavier, and then got heavier yet.

Heavy as in hail.

I am sure many of you have gone through a hailstorm before, as have I (I can recall a significant one in my youth in Florida for example). This, however, was noisier than anything I can remember. As in I could not even hear the television above the background noise of the impacts on the roof of my apartment unless I seriously jacked up the volume on the set. The bombardment also lasted longer than I can remember any previous hailstorm going on. And it was not the first hailstorm that had hit Canyon since I have been here, but it was most definitely the noisiest one I could recall. When it finally moved on, there was not a layer of hailstones, but the angle of my front door had a collection of them more than two inches high and a foot long (driven there by the wind).

From Canyon, it is about six miles north to where the Coles live. The storm arrived there, but the rain was apparently not as driven, and the hail was less severe (it may have been passing east of them on the track). Ten miles further north, and the storm hit Amarillo, where Jean said there was no hail, but enough rain to cause flooding problems and damage in her apartment complex. Perhaps four miles further north, and our offices do not appear to have been affected by all this.

Still, it was an unusual weather event for all of us, and none of us are displeased that none of the reported tornadoes that touched down during this period was any closer than 30 miles to any of us.