Video from Boulder, Colorado shows streets transformed into icy rivers amid slow moving storms that brought accumulating hail and flooding to parts of the state.
Severe thunderstorm and flash flood warnings peppered the Colorado Front Range, hoisted by forecasters at the local National Weather Service office in Boulder, located just south of downtown. Meteorologists at the office encountered hail, but it was tame compared with what residents in the heart of the city faced.
“At the office we got about a trace, but downtown it was at least a couple inches of hail,” said Zach Hiris, a meteorologist at the office, in a phone call.The hail wasn’t big — mostly the size of dimes, with a few quarter-sized stones thrown in — but there was a“Like a lot of the storms we’ve had the past few days, it was pretty slow-moving,” Hiris said. “It was also constantly redeveloping a new updraft. It was a really good case of a back building supercell.
That means that, as the rotating storm was moving forward, it kept redeveloping on its back side. The result? A continuous hailstorm for folks caught up beneath the angry clouds. “Thankfully we didn’t have a ton of instability, or else impacts would have been a lot higher,” said Hiris about the supercell, which he said “had a bit of rotation.”
Instability is the energy contained in warm, humid air near the ground that’s prone to rise into environments with colder air aloft. Think of it as thunderstorm fuel. The more instability, the taller the storm clouds, and the more robust the updraft, or column of upward-moving warm air feeding the storm. Large hail depends on stronger updrafts carrying moisture high into the sky, where it’s bitterly cold.
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