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Not just no, but Hail No!


jsharr
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This fell yesterday in Salado, Texas.   Salado is a very cool old Texas town that has become an artists enclave with tons of B&B's and restaurants on the Salado River in central Texas.  Used to be a stagecoach stop.  Have not heard how bad the damage is to the old part of Salado.

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23 minutes ago, jsharr said:

This fell yesterday in Salado, Texas. 

I was watching the Weather Channel the other night and they were talking about hail and how big it can get.  I thought I heard them say that 8 inches is the record.  I must have misunderstood because that looks bigger than 8 inches.   :o

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2 minutes ago, Road Runner said:

I was watching the Weather Channel the other night and they were talking about hail and how big it can get.  I thought I heard them say that 8 inches is the record.  I must have misunderstood because that looks bigger than 8 inches.   :o

I will file this under "Things jsharr will never hear"

 

also, are you sure what you were watching was the Weather Channel? 

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1 minute ago, jsharr said:

I will file this under "Things jsharr will never hear"

 

also, are you sure what you were watching was the Weather Channel? 

As I wrote that, I thought of a number of things that I could have added, but decided to let the forum have fun with it instead.  :D

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4 minutes ago, Road Runner said:

According to my calculations, an eight inch sphere of water (ice) should weigh more than 9 pounds. 

It seems amazing to me that a chunk of hail that big and heavy could be kept aloft by winds in a thunderstorm.   

Not sure it is solid.  It is a bunch of smaller stones that tumble and freeze to each other, so lots of chances for air spaces, or elongation.  Seldom a perfect sphere at that size.   I bet they get rounder each time they are taken out of the freezer for display as they melt and reform as well.  When they first hit the ground, they are funky shaped in my experience, but biggest we have had were golf ball or so.

 

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49 minutes ago, jsharr said:

This fell yesterday in Salado, Texas.   Salado is a very cool old Texas town that has become an artists enclave with tons of B&B's and restaurants on the Salado River in central Texas.  Used to be a stagecoach stop.  Have not heard how bad the damage is to the old part of Salado.

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I was watching that one on Flightaware.  There was an active tornado associated with the weather as well.  I was curious why an American flight was tucked right up beside it.  Hail loses up to 70% of its mass by the time it reaches the ground so imagine how big that could have been within the cell.  

That is why there is no shortage of this kind of picture online. 

636639065071655108-34274617-169096621760

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3 minutes ago, Wilbur said:

I was watching that one on Flightaware.  There was an active tornado associated with the weather as well.  I was curious why an American flight was tucked right up beside it.  Hail loses up to 70% of its mass by the time it reaches the ground so imagine how big that could have been within the cell.  

That is why there is no shortage of this kind of picture online. 

636639065071655108-34274617-169096621760

We need a WOW emoji!  That is crazy.  Have you ever flown in bad hail?

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2 minutes ago, jsharr said:

We need a WOW emoji!  That is crazy.  Have you ever flown in bad hail?

Sure.  It isn't comforting and isn't something we try to do.  Hail just has very poor radar reflectivity so it doesn't show up on weather radar.   Better to give storms 20 miles or so and hail may even be out that far. 

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Just now, Wilbur said:

Sure.  It isn't comforting and isn't something we try to do.  Hail just has very poor radar reflectivity so it doesn't show up on weather radar.   Better to give storms 20 miles or so and hail may even be out that far. 

So do you take immediate evasive action, course change, change of altitude?

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8 minutes ago, jsharr said:

So do you take immediate evasive action, course change, change of altitude?

Hail, yes!  All of the above.  I have even delayed and cancelled flights if it looks as though there is no safe way through it.  Deviations are very common and you always have the option of 180 degree deviation. :) 

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At Pratt and Whitney we used to test engines and components for rain, hail, bird ingestion.  Birds are bad as are chunks of ice that may form on the leading enge of the cowling.  The engine is designed so that hopefull it retains enough thrust to carry it's own weight and drag or under the very worst circumstances if it sheds blades and parts that they are contained withing the cowling and do not strike the fuselage.  When I was an apprentice there I worked some video shoots of "spin pit" tests where a fan is spinning horizontally in a round pit submerged in the floor.  Objects like birds are dropped onto the spinning fan and video is shot to see what the impact does in real time.  I once witnessed a test drop of a flock of birds, perhapse a dozen or more.

There was also a bird cannon at the outdoor test cell where a bird carcus could be fired into a running engine.  That led to a funny story about a young engineer (probably not true, but one can never tell) who was responsible for getting the birds (turkey) ready and loading and firing the cannon.  His day came and the cannon was fired and the engine just about scattered parts all over the property.  An older engineer slid up next to the shocked kid and gently enquired "you did thaw out the bird didn't you"?

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5 minutes ago, maddmaxx said:

That led to a funny story about a young engineer (probably not true, but one can never tell) who was responsible for getting the birds (turkey) ready and loading and firing the cannon.  His day came and the cannon was fired and the engine just about scattered parts all over the property.  An older engineer slid up next to the shocked kid and gently enquired "you did thaw out the bird didn't you"?

Yeah, I got fired over that one...

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