Observations from an amateur meteorologist

When I was in high school, I was one of those kids that liked to do science for fun. So I did science fair projects on weather forecasting. I lived in Oklahoma, where I think everyone becomes an amateur meteorologist. You almost have to. We didn't need the Weather Channel to tell us when a cloud was a wall cloud.

Today my old skills kicked into action when I saw this.

We had a gorgeous day today with beautiful blue skies and unseasonably warm temperatures (over 70 deg F), but it was very windy--for Indiana--and this morning is was over 25 degrees F colder just a couple of hours north of us. All in all, the perfect conditions for a big storm. This cloud type is called a cumulonimbus cloud, and if you look closely, you can see that the winds were really strong in the upper atmosphere.

I was using my camera phone, so the photo wasn't the greatest to show this, but you could see straight lines in the clouds. A lot of times strong upper winds like that lead to hail formation. When I got home, I captured what the radar looked like.

The red area near Anderson is what I captured in the cloud photo. Some of these storms have produced ping-pong size hail. Eeek! Unfortunately my concerns about the upper air winds were correct about the hail. You see, hail form because it's cold enough in the upper part of the cloud for water to freeze, and the wind causes the frozen water to bounce around in the cloud. While the frozen water bounces around, more frozen water accumulates on it. The frozen water continues to bounce around until the wind that's holding it up isn't strong enough to keep the frozen water/hail in the cloud anymore. That's when the hail falls to the ground. This isn't a very diagram, but hopefully it helps you see what I'm talking about.

(In case you're not familiar with severe storm radar, green means light rain, yellow means stronger rain, and red is the strongest. Red not only means strong rain, but also hail and possibly tornadoes if the conditions are right.)

We're continuing to have lots of storm cells like this tonight.  The storm I captured in the photo luckly has started to lose its strength.

My neighborhood has been very lucky. The main storm cell in our county was much stronger just south of my neighborhood. Hopefully no one will have serious damage tonight.

P.S. Sometime I'll talk about why I prefer the Fahrenheit scale for outdoor temperatures. :)

Come Explore the World with Me!

Do you ever think to yourself, "I wonder how that works", but you don't know where to learn more? Maybe you wish you could be a 4-year old again and ask "Why? Why? Why?" about something you've observed, but you don't have anyone to ask. I hope to be your guide into the world of science, the kind of science that's all around you. I'll explore animal behavior by telling stories about my silly dog. I'll talk about botany and meteorology using observations in my backyard. And I'll use field trips and experiments to show you how cool chemistry can be. Who knows what else we might discover together! So stay tuned!