Anatomy of a Denver hailstorm; back to beautiful here
Denver and Colorado's Front Range are notorious for hail in springtime. Monday's devastating hailstorm produced widespread damage. It takes nearly baseball sized hailstones falling at 100 mph to do damage like this.
Anatomy of a damaging hail event
How does a massive hailstorm like this develop?
Let's start from 23,000 miles in space. Thunderstorms clusters mushroomed high into the sky over Colorado Monday afternoon. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's GOES 16 high resolution loop captures amazing detail as the storm clusters erupt.
Create a More Connected Minnesota
MPR News is your trusted resource for the news you need. With your support, MPR News brings accessible, courageous journalism and authentic conversation to everyone - free of paywalls and barriers. Your gift makes a difference.
Denver's sheer elevation a mile above sea level insures plenty of cold air aloft as storms blow up this time of year.
That deep subfreezing zone produced impressive hailstones Monday as thunderstorm updrafts injected moisture high into the frozen sky.
It takes hail nearly 3 inches in diameter to do the kind of damage we saw in Denver Monday. Baseball sized hail is 2.75 inches in diameter.
Hail tracks
NOAA's dual-polarization Doppler can distinguish hail tracks. Look how they moved right through the heart of metro Denver Monday.
The hail was so deep it covered freeways like snow.
The intense hail swaths and heavy rainfall created instant rivers of hail in the streets of downtown Denver.
The wind-driven hail also produces damage to siding like this image. Straight out of Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds?"
Large hail blew out windows at this school. No school here today.
The low-pressure system that caused the hail continues to spin over Colorado today. More storms will blow this afternoon. Mercifully the best chance for more severe weather shifts east of metro Denver.
Minnesota: Back to beautiful
Last night's spotty thunderstorms produced a nice light show right here in Minnesota.
Rainfall totals were spotty, but between one-quarter inch and one-half inch for several locations. Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport picked up one-quarter inch Monday evening. At the Weather Lab here in Victoria in the southwest metro the rain was barely enough to wet the streets.
The latest model runs crank out a chance of rain tomorrow for southern Minnesota. The Twin Cities likely escapes rainfall Wednesday. NOAA's North American Mesoscale Forecast System model favors rainfall across southern Minnesota and Iowa Wednesday.
The latest trends suggest dry and mainly sunny weather right through next weekend.
The numbers above could be conservative for next weekend. NOAA's Global Forecast Syste is cranking out highs in the upper 70s.
Stay tuned.