Under late-afternoon sunlight, the shoulder of a Colorado dirt road forms a fine backdrop to exhibit the complex structures of four severe hailstones that had fallen about an hour earlier, with partial melting since. I had mined these from some nearby grass, which tends to keep the hail elevated above relatively warm ground and into a shallow layer of hail-refrigerated air. This preserves the stones a little longer after a storm, so that folks like me can pluck and examine them. Each of these, as well as countless dozens of others of similar size, were somewhat flattened specimens containing the same sort of “hailstone within hailstone” that, tens of thousands of feet aloft in a super-saturated updraft, formed the basis for a thick layer of clear-ice accretion. For more explanation of how these stones probably came to look like this, please go back to Bigger than Bicentennial, featuring another severe hailstone from the same storm.
3 SSE Yuma CO (21 Jun 10) Looking down.
40.0833, -102.701Quartet with Quarter
Under late-afternoon sunlight, the shoulder of a Colorado dirt road forms a fine backdrop to exhibit the complex structures of four severe hailstones that had fallen about an hour earlier, with partial melting since. I had mined these from some nearby grass, which tends to keep the hail elevated above relatively warm ground and into a shallow layer of hail-refrigerated air. This preserves the stones a little longer after a storm, so that folks like me can pluck and examine them. Each of these, as well as countless dozens of others of similar size, were somewhat flattened specimens containing the same sort of “hailstone within hailstone” that, tens of thousands of feet aloft in a super-saturated updraft, formed the basis for a thick layer of clear-ice accretion. For more explanation of how these stones probably came to look like this, please go back to Bigger than Bicentennial, featuring another severe hailstone from the same storm.
3 SSE Yuma CO (21 Jun 10) Looking down.
40.0833, -102.701