Two-inch hail on New Mexico/Texas border

Two-inch hail was reported on a storm on the New Mexico/Texas border, just on the edge of the Lubbock, TX CWA (Figure 1). At 21:04 UTC, 56 minutes prior to the report, ProbSevere v3 (PSv3) was 58% while PSv2 was 8% (Figure 2). At that point, the low ENI and GLM flash rates (≤ 4 fl/min) and modest environmental shear (≤ 30 kt) was dramatically reducing the PSv2 probabilities, whereas the shear was higher in PSv3 (36 kt) and the PSv3 models are less affected by low lightning (note: this storm eventually became well-electrified). The team in Lubbock today has noted how high PSv3 was prior to PSv2 early in the storms' development. While this is not always the case, it was true in Texas today because of the dearth of lightning early on.

Figure 1: ProbSevere v3 contours, MRMS MergedReflectivity, and NWS severe weather warnings for a storm on the NM/TX border.

 

Figure 2: Time series comparison of PSv2 and PSv3 for the storm in Figure 1. The annotation is valid for 21:04 UTC, when PSv2