Re: RIk's 56 ultramatic

Posted by DavidPackard On 2023/3/3 20:33:07

Howard

The first and only time I experienced graupel was in Scottsdale AZ. Seems the storm laid down a stripe of the stuff about 1 mile wide and 5 or 6 miles long. Not a very big area, but the depth was at least 2 – 3 inches. It was something like an intense hailstorm without the noise and car damage . . . pellets not much bigger than BBs, and not quite frozen solid. The pellets seem to block the water run-off, so the streets were quite a mess with water that couldn’t drain. There was a spring training baseball field in the path of the storm, and after the storm passed every news helicopter was taking video footage of the fields covered in white. The surface air temperature was quite mild, so this must have come from an attitude similar to hail. The TV weather people that night were just aflutter trying to explain what had just happened. Wikipedia has an article that explains the snowflake and super-cooled water formation of graupel. They, the weather heads, consider graupel distinct from hail, but from ground level it looked the same to me.

dp