Severe Weather This Morning?

That's right! You read the title correctly. We actually had a little severe weather early this morning. It was very isolated and quite brief but it was there. It occurred in one lone storm cell near the Sioux City area. Doppler radar indicated that hail the size of quarters was falling from the storm. Well, for those of you who don't know how we are able to see hail on Doppler radar, let me show you. The first image below is a normal radar image that you would see on TV or on your computer at home. But the image below that is another product of radar called VIL. VIL stands for Vertically Integrated Liquid. Basically what it shows is the radar takes a vertical slice of the atmosphere, depicts how much mass is in that slice (water vapor, rain drops, hail, etc...) and then assigns a number and a color to that slice of the atmosphere. The higher the number or color, the more mass there is in the atmosphere and the higher the likelihood of hail. In this case, the color scheme is the same as a normal radar and can be seen on the left side of the picture. Generally speaking, you need to get to the yellow color to find severe hail in a storm but, it does vary from storm to storm depending on location and time of the year.

So, going into severe weather season, you have a little extra knowledge of how things work. Hopefully, we wont see anymore pictures like these for a while.

~KDLT Meteorologist Cody Matz