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Mexico Hail: Ice 1.5m thick Carpets Guadalajara

posted by martyb on Monday July 01 2019, @04:13PM   Printer-friendly
from the How-to-keep-a-cool-head-in-summer dept.

SemperOSS writes:

Freak flooding in Guadalajara after a massive hail storm. Pictures on BBC:

Six suburbs in the Mexican city of Guadalajara were carpeted in a thick layer of ice after a heavy hailstorm. The ice was up to 1.5m (5ft) thick in places, half-burying vehicles.

[...] Hailstorms form when warm, moist air from the surface rises upwards forming showers and storms. Temperatures higher up, even in summer, can get well below 0C and so ice crystals form along with something called "supercooled water" which then grows into pellets of ice.

In severe thunderstorms, air can rise rapidly and is able to hold up these hailstones and allow them to expand in size. Eventually they get too heavy and fall to the ground.

In warmer parts of the year, such as in Guadalajara which has maximum temperatures of around 31-32C [(87-90 °F)] in June, more moisture is available, contributing to the formation of hailstorms.

Temperatures this month have been higher than normal with Torreon, to the north of Guadalajara, reaching highs of 37C [(99 °F)].

Hm, I wonder if somebody is going to mention anthropogenic warming with this?

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 01 2019, @05:02PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 01 2019, @05:02PM (#862058)

    Temperatures higher up, even in summer, can get well below 0C

    If this is true why don't we just move the surface of the earth up a few meters so it cools down?

    I suspect this is a troll question, but it triggered the What [xkcd.com] If [xkcd.com] XKCD [xkcd.com] series in my mind, so let me take a gander.

    We don't because of several reasons:
    1) It'd be extremely hard to do. It would take an infeasible amount of energy to move that much soil around to lift any appreciable amount of area up. Likewise, the social chaos (and maybe infrastructure and crop failure) displacement would be crazy. Think of how much disruption is caused when trying to move a bridge under on a busy highway, and that's just one piece of limited use area, not an entire city or farmland.
    2) It would cause other issues it would not address, or even make worse. For example, there would be unknown impacts to rainfall (and thus crop harvests). Radiation from could be worse due to less atmosphere between us and the Sun.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 01 2019, @05:27PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 01 2019, @05:27PM (#862083)

    We could get the required energy by slowing the rotation of the earth.