Thank goodness everyone was safe!
Source: Twitter, Beau Sorensen
Upon seeing the result of that flight from Boston to Salt Lake City which was diverted to Denver last night (Friday, August 7) because of hail damage, I investigated further, having been a meteorologist on many flights in which I thought, "They're going to fly through THAT??" This case seemed different, in that Beau (tweet above) was quoted as referring to flying between two storms, and hail shafts aren't like lightning bolts from the blue shooting way out the side of a storm.
I retrieved radar images and plotted the location of the plane at the time (from FlightAware log; the anim GIF pauses at the location closest to and immediately after the incident). The flight path aimed to get between the two areas of thunderstorms, but they were merging ...
Credit for all radar images/loops unless otherwise noted: Gibson Ridge
Here is a zoomed 4-panel of the base reflectivity (BREF) and several hail parameters/algorithms, including Vertically Integrated Liquid Density (VILD), Maximum Estimated Hail Size (MESH), and Probability of Severe Hail (POSH), with the first available location of the plane immediately after the incident:
And a 3-D sequence, isolating the higher reflectivities, which don't necessarily correspond exactly to where the hail was, but the purples and darkest reds can give an indication; and the flight log shows that the plane wasn't up at an altitude that commercial flights sometimes are (I've been as high as 41K feet on recent flights), it was between 33K & 34K. The particularly high spike is in the image most immediately before the incident; view is toward the SW, as the plane was flying.
And .... Looking at a longer, wider radar loop, it gets even more interesting meteorologically ...
Two boundaries, one from thunderstorm outflow, merging into one, begetting the tstorm line segment that got the plane, then during/after the merger process everything not only becoming a larger MCS (mesoscale convective system), but a spinning MCV (mesoscale convective vortex)!
Image credit: NCAR/UCAR/RAL
Source: Twitter, Beau Sorensen
Upon seeing the result of that flight from Boston to Salt Lake City which was diverted to Denver last night (Friday, August 7) because of hail damage, I investigated further, having been a meteorologist on many flights in which I thought, "They're going to fly through THAT??" This case seemed different, in that Beau (tweet above) was quoted as referring to flying between two storms, and hail shafts aren't like lightning bolts from the blue shooting way out the side of a storm.
I retrieved radar images and plotted the location of the plane at the time (from FlightAware log; the anim GIF pauses at the location closest to and immediately after the incident). The flight path aimed to get between the two areas of thunderstorms, but they were merging ...
Credit for all radar images/loops unless otherwise noted: Gibson Ridge
Here is a zoomed 4-panel of the base reflectivity (BREF) and several hail parameters/algorithms, including Vertically Integrated Liquid Density (VILD), Maximum Estimated Hail Size (MESH), and Probability of Severe Hail (POSH), with the first available location of the plane immediately after the incident:
And a 3-D sequence, isolating the higher reflectivities, which don't necessarily correspond exactly to where the hail was, but the purples and darkest reds can give an indication; and the flight log shows that the plane wasn't up at an altitude that commercial flights sometimes are (I've been as high as 41K feet on recent flights), it was between 33K & 34K. The particularly high spike is in the image most immediately before the incident; view is toward the SW, as the plane was flying.
And .... Looking at a longer, wider radar loop, it gets even more interesting meteorologically ...
Two boundaries, one from thunderstorm outflow, merging into one, begetting the tstorm line segment that got the plane, then during/after the merger process everything not only becoming a larger MCS (mesoscale convective system), but a spinning MCV (mesoscale convective vortex)!
Image credit: NCAR/UCAR/RAL
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6. Geoboy645
9:02 PM GMT on August 09, 2015| Good Article and very intresting |
5. wxenthus
7:25 PM GMT on August 09, 2015|
What a great review. Nice job. Mike |
4. beell
5:41 PM GMT on August 09, 2015|
I love the forensic meteorology stuff, Stu! Hindsight and ground radar
would seem to indicate there was only a razor thin margin of making the
gap before the cell merger. Thanks for taking the time to pull this together. Too bad the PECAN project ended before this event. |
3. Barefootontherocks
4:24 PM GMT on August 09, 2015| Thanks for the great analysis. |
2.
Stu Ostro
,
Senior Meteorologist
3:59 AM GMT on August 09, 2015
Quoting 1. Astrometeor:Thanks, Astrometeor, and hope your first flight goes well! |
1. Astrometeor
1:17 AM GMT on August 09, 2015| Awesome. I fly for the first time ever on my way back to Millersville, PA for sophomore year of college. Thanks Mr. Ostro. |
