225 Lightning Flashes/Min; 69,000-foot Cloudtops; The Unprecedented Storms Of Cordoba Province

[hatrack]

Several storms merge into a ‘‘mesoscale convective system’’ over the resort town of Villa Carlos Paz, Argentina, December 2018. Mitch Dobrowner for The New York Times

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As forecaster, Lenardon’s chief concern was identifying weather patterns that might breed a thunderstorm, which on the pampas are notoriously swift and violent. Few official records are kept in Córdoba and the surrounding regions, but over the previous two years alone, newspapers reported that hail, flooding and tornadoes had damaged or razed thousands of acres of cropland, displaced more than five thousand people and killed about a dozen. Locals described barbed hailstones, shaped like medieval flails, destroying buildings and burying cars up to the hoods. Lenardon’s own family had lost their entire harvest to flooding three of the last five years, forcing them at one point onto state assistance. People in Berrotarán spent much of their summer bracing for the atmosphere to explode; the fire department had recently taken to standing at the ready with rescue equipment and heavy machinery, in hopes of getting a jump on digging people out of debris. Even so, Lenardon didn’t think much of the fog when he first saw it. The cool, moist air didn’t indicate anything, as far as he knew, except a welcome relief from the heat.

As Lenardon prepared to leave the station, he pulled up the feed from the region’s lone radar dish in the nearby city of Córdoba, more out of habit than anything else. When the radar completed its 15-minute sweep, a massive red splotch flashed on the screen — a powerful storm appeared to be bearing down on them. Convinced it was a glitch, Lenardon raced outside to check the sky — forgetting in his panic that it was shrouded by fog. While the fog had little meteorological effect on the storm, it had nonetheless ensured that it would be maximally destructive. “No one could feel the wind,” he said. “No one could see the sierras.” Though he rushed to go live on the radio, it was already 9 a.m. by the time he issued a severe storm warning for 9:15.

The storm descended quickly. It engulfed the western side of Berrotarán, where winds began gusting at over 80 m.p.h. Soon, hail poured down, caving in the roof of a machine shop and shattering windshields. In 20 minutes, so much ice had begun to accumulate that it stood in the street in mounds, like snowdrifts. As the hail and rain continued to intensify, they gradually mixed into a thick white slurry, encasing cars, icing over fields and freezing the town’s main canal. With the drainage ditches filled in and frozen, parts of the town flooded, transforming the dirt roads into surging muddy rivers. Residents watched as their homes filled with icy water.

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When Nesbitt and the others began combing through the scans and data, they found that several of the other storms they’d observed in Argentina had formed similarly strong updrafts — many of them as much as 60 percent larger than those in North American storms. One had reached over 69,000 feet, among the tallest ever documented. Others covered more than 15 square miles — a massive plume of air surging upward at more than 150 m.p.h. Based on the initial DOW scans, Nesbitt could infer that the scale and strength of the updrafts were a major source of the storms’ violence. As winds within the updrafts began to widen and intensify, they not only gathered more moisture and heat, feeding the storms’ growth, but also held that volatile mixture aloft, potentially turning it deadly. Suspended this way, at 30,000 feet or so, for several minutes or longer, the mixture froze, forming vast fields of tumbling ice crystals, which, given enough space and time, collided repeatedly, sparking lightning, or gradually congealing into enormous hailstones.

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Maria Natividad Garay holds a hailstone she recovered outside her home in Villa Carlos Paz, Argentina. Mitch Dobrowner for The New York Times

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https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/22/magazine/worst-storms-argentina.html

[AllaN01Bear]

1. day after tomrrow is here . eep