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'Gargantuan' hail in Argentina may have smashed world record:
A supercell thunderstorm pelted a city center in Argentina a few years ago with hailstones so large scientists suggested a new category to describe them — gargantuan hail.
Researchers investigating the 2018 storm found one hailstone likely measured between 7.4 and 9.3 inches across, potentially setting a new world record. The current record belongs to a hailstone that measured 8 inches across, or about the size of a volleyball, that fell near Vivian, South Dakota.
"It's incredible," said Matthew Kumjian, associate professor in the Department of Meteorology and Atmosphere Science at Penn State. "This is the extreme upper end of what you'd expect from hail."
The scientists proposed hail larger than 6 inches should be classified as gargantuan, and said more awareness of these events, while rare, could help piece together a better understanding of the dangerous storms.
"Anything larger than about a quarter in size can start putting dents into your car," Kumjian said. "In some rare cases, 6-inch hail has actually gone through roofs and multiple floors in houses. We'd like to help mitigate the impacts on life and property, to help anticipate these kinds of events."
The storm in heavily populated Villa Carlos Paz, Argentina, offered scientists a rare opportunity to study a well-documented case of gargantuan hail. As the storm unfolded, residents took to social media, posting pictures and videos.
Hail typically occurs during severe storms, which produce strong, sustained updrafts. The winds hold hailstones aloft long enough to grow in sub-zero temperatures high in the atmosphere. But predicting hail size remains challenging, the scientists said.
Journal Reference:
Matthew R. Kumjian, Rachel Gutierrez, et al. "Gargantuan Hail in Argentina", Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society Vol. 101, No. 4 (2020), DOI: https://doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-19-0012.1
See the PDF of the report for the full analysis. Scroll down to the end for pictures of the three largest gargantuan hail they included in their report. One of the hail stones weighed over a pound (~ 1/2 kilogram)!
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 01 2020, @07:25PM (1 child)
The use of quotes implies that somehow the scientists' work is illegitimate. Did you read the scientific paper [ametsoc.org] that describes their work?
As for this happening two years ago, there are good reasons why it wasn't published until now. The scientists were funded to travel to South America as part of the RELAMPAGO field campaign [nsf.gov], which didn't begin until late 2018. They visited the scene where video of these hailstones was recorded to measure objects in the scene and try to estimate how large the hailstones in the video actually were. Analyzing the data might not have begun until after the field campaign ended, and likely required some time. Then there's the time required to write and revise the journal paper. And peer review takes time, especially if there are multiple iterations of reviews. The initial review may take over a month and it's incredibly rare for a paper to be accepted on the initial review. Normally, there are revisions, perhaps multiple rounds, before a paper is accepted. This is being reported now because the paper has been accepted for publication in BAMS. And that paper describes the photogrammetric analysis in significant detail.
The research isn't just about investigating an unusually large hail storm, but understanding why some supercell thunderstorms produce giant hail while most do not. As the authors note, there wasn't anything particularly notable about the storm environment that would have suggested that giant hail was likely. A lot of severe thunderstorm and tornado warnings are based on radar observations rather than ground truth. While dual-polarization radar makes it easier to detect large and giant hail, the radar signatures for storms producing giant hail often aren't that different from other storms producing smaller, but still severe, hail. Detection of large hail with typical c-band and s-band weather radars is challenging because the interaction between the microwaves and scatterers behaves differently for large hydrometeors that are large relative to the wavelength of the microwaves. Mie scattering occurs instead of Rayleigh scattering.
Studying these events is worthwhile because one of the main research interests of these scientists is to improve warnings for large hail by developing better algorithms to predict hail size from radar observations. This work matters because there's a big difference in the damage caused by two inch hail (which is still quite destructive) versus four inch hail or six inch hail (which the authors propose should be termed gargantuan hail). They are legitimate scientists and their work matters because it may result in better accuracy in warning for hail storms that may be particularly destructive.
(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Saturday May 02 2020, @04:05AM
The thread was about criticising journalism not science. TFS did a poor job of communicating any science. Having your post there instead would have been superior.