The clouds have burst and rain and hail are about to fall.
Explorations
A Storm is Born
Dispatch 4: Finally! The Clouds Burst
Jerry Guynes and I are sitting in lawn chairs in a field near the SMART (Shared Mobile Atmospheric Research and Teaching) radar truck waiting for the clouds to unroll. Paul Markowski, assistant professor of meteorology at Penn State, is watching the sky and pacing. It's late afternoon and we're sweating in the hot sun. The clouds are gathering in front of us.
Field coordinator Erik Rasmussen sends a message over the radio to change position. The cold front is moving rapidly to the east and we need to move our sampling box. It takes us 20 minutes to pack up and drive about a mile down the road. As soon as we start setting up in our new position we get another call to redeploy. As we pack up for the second time I can see huge clouds billowing upward in the distance.
As we drive east, we hit a wall of rain, then hail. Rasmussen suggests that we drive west to get away from it and instead the worst of the storm slams us. Dime-sized hail bounces off the windshield. Guynes, concerned about damage to his radar dish, takes refuge under a bridge. Later, some of the students in the geek mobiles tell me that they saw the clearly defined hail column from miles away. The hail continues for several minutes. After it subsides, Rasmussen must coax Guynes out from under the bridge. The radar dish survives unscathed.
As the armada retreats to Norman we encounter torrents of rain and blinding cloud-to-ground lightning. The visibility is poor and I understand now that driving home in a severe thunderstorm is definitely the most dangerous part of this kind of fieldwork.