Hail!
On Thursday, Brisbane had a fantastic storm - complete with wind, rain, lightning, thunder and hail! Of course, “great” is a relative term - I didn’t get hurt or have any of my property damaged, whereas many cars/houses probably suffered - so my apologies to them! I, however, was in a bus along one of the main roads, and had a wonderful view of the hail bucketing down outside and making a glorious sound on the roof. I’ve always been a big fan of storms - I used to sit out on my balcony when I was a kid, and measure time between the thunder and the lightning to see how far away the hits were. (Light (from the lightning) reaches you almost (or near enough) instantaneously, while the resulting thunder can only travel at the speed of sound, about 330 metres per second. Therefore, measuring the time between seeing the lightning and hearing the thunder can tell you how far away the lightning is - every 3 second interval corresponds to one kilometre, or about 5 seconds to the mile.) And hail, well what can I say. I used to dash outside and try and grab the ice to look at it, cut it open and try and see the concentric rings that form when hailstones make multiple trips through the clouds and build up more layers. (Unfortunately, this only happens with the larger stones (>1 inch, say) and so isn’t that common. The ones last week didn’t have rings!)
Just to give you an idea of how cool the storm was, I took a movie of it while I was on the bus - here’s an edited clip. The white stuff on the road is note snow - it’s actually hail! Pretty amazing, hey? Remarkably (at least to me) the hail survived for a full 24 hours - when I got home, there was a pile of hail outside my door, and it was still there the next morning and evening, though was gone by Saturday. Near the Uni, hail was banked up on the side of the road so that it really did look like snow…at least one person made snowmen! (Hailmen?) I don’t really understand how it’s able to last so long - I guess that ice is a pretty poor conductor of heat, and so even in the sunshine and on the ground it didn’t melt. The days have been cold, but nowhere like sub-zero…interesting!
Anyway, I’ve should get back to my PhD - no Star Wars this week, so there’s nothing for me to be distracted by!