Meet meteorological detectives by trying to decipher why hail becomes a more important problem
The pursuit
From mid-May to the end of June, Icechip storm hunters crossed the front range of rocks and central plains, sometimes rolling in armored vehicles against the falling ice. They launched drones, published meteorological balloons and installed mobile doppler radars – all the techniques refined by Tornado hunters.
While a group positioned mobile mobile radars to intercept the storm at a blank range, other researchers were responsible for the release of meteorological balloons nearby or for the implementation of sensors to measure the size and speed of a hail strike.
During certain storms, the researchers published hundreds of Pingpong balls type devices called hail in the path of the tempests to follow the life cycle of a hailstone – when it melts and freezing, and how the dynamics of the wind which raise and drop these pieces of ice affects their growth.
Convective thunderstorms, with large internal ascending currents, generate hail by circulating a mixture of water and ice crystals in the freezing layers of the high atmosphere. Hail is generally formed at altitudes of 20,000 to 50,000 feet, where temperatures are between 22 degrees and 14 degrees Fahrenheit. These same ascending currents sweep the sleeves in the generating parts of the hail of each storm.
“If we can follow this sensor over time, we will, at least for some of these storms, understand the exact path, the exact trajectory that a hail takes,” Victor Gensini, a meteorology teacher at the Northern Illinois University and a principal researcher Icechip, said.
In an atmosphere warmed by climate change, “we get much more instability,” said peopleini, who, according to the researchers, creates stronger ascending currents.
These stronger ascending currents can take care of the larger railings for more time, which allows balls or ice records to gain mass, before gravity sends them in the ground.
“It’s a bit like taking a hair dryer and turning it to an end, it is quite easy to balance a Pingpong ball, on the right, in this air flow,” said Gensini. “But what would you need to balance softball? You would need a much stronger upward flow flow.”
Storm modeling suggests that stronger ascending currents will increase the frequency of significant hail in the future, even if it decreases the probability of hail overall. The researchers suspect that the small hail will decrease because its lower mass means that it will take more time. When he is close to the surface, he has often melted towards water.
“There is this kind of dichotomy, by the way, where you get less hail but greater hail in these warmer atmospheres that have very strong ascending currents,” said peopleini.
During their field campaign, the researchers accumulated a collection of more than 10,000 creases in dry ice cream chests to try to determine whether their IT models obtain the dynamics of hail growth.
“The hail record is a bit disorderly,” said peopleini about previous data, adding that observers have recorded more hail of 2, 3 and 4 inch, but it is not clear if it is because more people continue and find a big hail or because the atmosphere has more.
Gensini said that new measures will help researchers compare what is going on in the air to what they find in the field, which should improve hail forecasts and alleviate economic losses.
In many areas where Icechip works, there is a lot of agriculture, according to Karen Kosiba, an atmospheric scientist from the flexible team of the University of Illinois of Radars and Mesonte team who also works with Icechip.
“This affects their harvests, their machines, their appearance,” she said. “There are a lot of economic links with the weather.”
