 Hi everybody. Thank you for joining us this afternoon. We're really excited that you can be with us today for a conversation with scientists about discoveries from Rolámpago, Gargantuan Hail. My name is Lorena Medina Luna and I am an Education and Outreach Specialist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research or NCAR, which is a world-leading organization dedicated to the study of the atmosphere, the earth system, and the sun. And today, we're having a conversation about hail. So it typically happens in the summer or spring. And we have with us Dr. Matt Cumbrian from Pennsylvania State University, National Weather Service Meteorologist, Rachel Gutierrez. And Victoria Doreta is going to see if she can join us today, but some things have come up. So if she joins us, then we'll let you know when she does. They'll be talking today a little bit about the Rolámpago Field Campaign and talk about Gargantuan Hail, which you may or may not have heard of before. And at this point, you might be wondering, what is Rolámpago? It translates to a flash of lightning. But as everything in science, it is also an acronym for the field campaign. And it stands for remote sensing of electrification, lightning, and mesoscale, microscale processes with adaptive ground observations. We'll let that sink in. But throughout the event, we'll be happily able to take your questions and engage through interactive polls using the application Slido. If you slide down the webpage, you'll join Slido and answer, you can join Slido and answer some of the polls that are currently available for your participation. We will be recording this conversation and share it with everybody through our NCAR Explorer Series website. Now I'd like to introduce our panelist versus Dr. Matthew Kunjian. He is an associate professor in the department of meteorology and atmospheric sciences at Penn State University. His research focuses on understanding the intricate precipitation processes in high-impact storms. He uses radar observations and computer models to study the physical processes in severe storms to ultimately improve weather simulations and forecasts of hazardous weather. Dr. Kunjian received his PhD in meteorology from the University of Oklahoma and was an advanced study program postdoctoral researcher at NCAR. Outside of meteorology, Dr. Kunjian is a principal violinist in the Netany Valley Symphony Orchestra. Thanks, Loretta. Yeah, and we also have Rachel Gutierrez. She is a meteorologist for the National Weather Service in State College, Pennsylvania. Prior to working there, she worked on projects that bridged the gap between weather forecasting and emergency management as an undergraduate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She received her master's degree in meteorology and atmospheric sciences at Penn State working with Dr. Kunjian, where she studied gargantuan hail, which is hail that is greater than six inches in maximum dimension, so it's pretty big. And she used weather, she used radar and environmental data in her analyses. Rachel has always had a passion for education and outreach, decision support, and emergency management as it relates to the weather and earth science. And Victoria Doretta is an eyewitness to the 2018 gargantuan hail event that took place in Argentina. At the time of the hail event, she was a high school student and preparing to have dinner when the hail storm occurred. After seeing a particularly large stone land in their yard from her living room window, Victoria donned on a bicycle helmet like a motorcycle bike helmet and ran out to get it. Not recommended to do this at home or anywhere because bicycle helmets are not the best or anything to go out in a hail storm. Just stay safe inside your homes as possible. Victoria kept the hail stone in the freezer until a local university came to pick it up, so we'll have a picture of that as well. With that, I'm so happy to introduce Rachel and Matt for now and we'll see if Victoria can log on later. And I'll pass it over to you guys. I heard you guys have a quick presentation about what is your lampago and get us into the mode of what is hail? All right, I will start sharing my screen. All right, can everybody see that okay? Yes, we can see it. I think you just got to do presentation mode. Perfect. All right, is that good? Can everyone see that? Looks great. Okay. All right, so welcome to Discoveries from Relantago. First, I'd like to start with this picture because this is where I lived for eight weeks. It was in Dow seven or Doppler on wheel seven. It's basically a radar truck. So we have radars all over the U.S. that are stationary and they just stay in one place all the time taking data and collecting information. But for the field campaign, we're able to put radars on trucks and make them mobile so that we can drive around to wherever we need to be to set up for the storm and then we sit and wait and collect the data. And we level the truck to make sure that the data is good. So that's why the truck is kind of elevated. And yeah, so this was like where I lived. This is amazing to be in this radar truck. So we're going to start with what's a field campaign? So if anybody has any questions about field campaigns or what they entail, you can go ahead and start asking them now. And I'm just going to talk quickly about my experience on the field campaign. So to start off, this is me in the Dow. I already mentioned that this is where I lived for eight weeks. So it was an amazing experience to just sit in the truck all day during the IOP, which is an intense observing a period, and collect data. And we saw many beautiful sites during Rilampago. So the first one is Mamadis and that's what's taking outside our hotel actually on the way to survey a storm. And then the other picture, we saw many, many rainbows. The vehicle pictured there is a scout. And that one is another tool to collect weather data. It's not a radar, but it collects wind speed, temperature, humidity, anything else that we need. And then there's also weather instruments in the back of the truck that we would take out of the truck and put on the side of the road to collect more information. And we actually launched weather balloons out of the back of the truck as well. So that was really fun too to be part of both of those. We had a lot of visitors of locusts at the Rilampago Field Campaign as well. A lot of them came to the Dallas and sat on the radar dish and just rotated around with the radar dish. So that was really fun. At one point I counted 15 different locusts on our Dow 7 radar dish just rotating around with it. I think they liked that it was moving and it was warm. So that was really funny. This is me on a particularly great day when we actually had hail at the radar. So I got outside and started collecting it. It was small hail, so I wasn't in any danger. But it was really, really fun to see that. And then I of course got my hail ruler out and slapped that down and took some pictures. So I was very happy that day. Sometimes there are issues with the equipment. And this is me fixing it with a stick. So this is me on top of the scout. The anemometer wasn't working. So sometimes you had to just gently tap it with a stick to get it to encourage back to work. So that was another thing that we did was also fix the instruments if they broke down. This is me putting a hail pad on the ground. It's very scientific. You take the hail pad and you take a hammer and you nail it to the ground. So that was a lot of fun too when I was with the scout. We were able to put the hail pads down. And then this is me with Vanessa. She's from Brazil. She was on the field campaign with us. And this is us launching the last weather balloon on the field campaign of the whole field campaign. So that was a really special moment. And this is an image from one of the last observation periods. So this is looking at the supercell off in the distance. And it was just a particularly nice photo because it's nighttime and you can see the radar spinning around. This is me inside the dow with my buddy Martine who was with me during the entire time. Unfortunately, Maiana is not pictured. She's actually driving the truck. But she's also in the truck with us at this time. Martine was from Buenos Aires and he was with me the entire time we were in the dow. This is a picture of a hail pad. Not the one that I put in the ground but a different one that actually got completely shredded by hail. So there's no tinfoil left on top at all as you can see. So that was a particularly exciting day as well because obviously we got a lot of hail data on that day. And then this is a picture of just a smidge of the amount of people that were involved in the campaign. So this is of course, field campaigns are not possible without teamwork. And this is just a few of the people who were able to go out actually on the field with us. So these are the people who were out in the field collecting data, running the trucks, driving through the storms. And there's a whole other group of people who were in the operation center, reading our data as it came in, collecting it, looking at it, analyzing it, planning where we go, making sure that we're all safe, coordinating the teams. So this is just a fraction of the people who are involved. But it's good to acknowledge everyone that was there involved with it, because you can't get a field campaign done without teamwork. With that, I'm going to pass it off to Dr. Kamgen. All right, thank you, Rachel. If there's any questions for Rachel or for any of us here, then feel free to put them on the slide. Otherwise, I will share my screen now. And can everybody see this okay? All right, great. So as Lorena said in the introduction, for Lampago, it both means a flash of lightning, but also as an acronym. And here is the acronym. I've kind of highlighted the letters that make up this acronym. And so remote sensing, what Rachel just showed with the Doppler on Wheels, radars are a type of remote sensor so we can sense the storm or probe a storm remotely. Electrification and lightning, obviously associated with thunderstorms. Mesoscale and microscale, those are terms that we use to describe just the spatial and temporal scales of phenomenon like thunderstorms. Processes, like Lorena said in the introduction that I'm interested in precipitation processes, so that kind of goes into that. And then with adaptive ground observations, as Rachel just showed, having those vehicles driving out and exploring the storms. So this field campaign took place in the first of November through 18th of December in North Central Argentina. So you may ask yourselves, why Argentina? Why do we have to go all the way to South America to look at thunderstorms? So what this is here, this picture you'll see is a climatology, which means basically how often does hail occur from satellites? So it's estimated from satellites. The satellites can't actually see the hail, but they can use different proxies about how tall or how cold the cloud temperatures are that they can measure. And to try to determine how many days a year you get hail. So obviously, if you look up in the United States and the Great Plains, where we're more commonly associated, the big severe storms out there, you see some hot spots. Those colors as they go from the greens to blues to reds into the warmer colors represent basically more frequent hail storms. So you also see hot spots in Central Africa. But then down here in southeastern South America, you also see hot spots. And that's where the Villampe Go Field Project was taking place. In particular, what's interesting about North Central Argentina is that there is quite a bit of complex terrain. If you go far than enough west, you have the Andes Mountains, which are very tall. And then it has some foothills and then goes into sort of more plains, kind of like you'd expect in sort of the plains of the United States. But because of the close proximity of these mountains and the plains, we ended up having storms initiate on those mountains very frequently. So it's a nice natural laboratory to study both the storms and the interactions it has with the complex terrain. So the Villampe Go Field campaign had a lot of different goals. But the three goals that we were in particular interested in were to look at the formation of storms, how they form every day along these mountains in the terrain. To study the severe weather that is caused by these storms, the impacts, the actual sensible impacts that these storms have on society. And to study why these storms, unlike those in the United States, continue to just get bigger and bigger and sort of grow into these massive, massive complexes. And further, this region, besides those satellite-based studies, is really not well understood. There are a lot of reports of thunderstorms and newspapers and things like that, but it's a big unknown as to why the specific hazards are being caused at those times. So we're going to focus on the goal number two, which was the severe weather. So what exactly was happening. And in particular, we were interested in the formation and the processes associated with very large hail. So it turns out that the previous eyewitness reports claimed that there is very large hail in the region right around where we're staying, which is this town called Visha Carlos Pass. In fact, that's where Victoria is from, and she'll be giving her eyewitness account here in just a little bit. But before we get into the details of that, I wanted to show a little bit just on what you need to get really big hail. So what you see in this animation on the left is a computer simulation of a hailstorm. So this gray stuff is sort of the clouds that you might see if you were to go out and look at a storm. And you see this little blue pathway that's being traced out with this kind of turquoise-colored ball. Obviously, that's not the scale, but the size of that ball represents the size of the growing hailstorm. And that blue path is the pathway that that hailstorm takes within the big storm. And so in order to get big hail like this in a thunderstorm, we need several different ingredients, just like if you were going to make a cake. So first, we need a strong updraft. So obviously, anytime you see hail, it's coming from a thunderstorm. Those thunderstorms have very strong winds that move upwards vertically into the atmosphere. And that's what we call a strong updraft. And those updrafts are helpful because they can help support the growing particles that become hailstones and kind of align them with where the other ingredients are. Also, another key ingredient is what we call supercool liquid water. So this is a supercool, just means it's a fancy term for liquid water that's persisting as liquid under 32 degrees Fahrenheit or under 0 degrees Celsius. It sort of can stay that way until it comes in contact with the surface. Third, we need a nucleus for growth, which we call an embryo, or hailstorm embryo. And typically, these are little particles like frozen raindrops or little snow particles that end up getting swept into that updraft and come in contact with their supercool liquid water. And when that happens, they get freezing of that liquid and basically layer after layer, the hailstorm can grow until it finally falls out of the cloud. And then the final ingredient we like to talk about is resonance time. And resonance time just means how long can you keep that particle in that hail factory? The longer it stays in the hail factory, the bigger it's going to be. And so when all of these ingredients come together in really unique combination and kind of the right conditions at the right time, you can get very, very large hail deform. Before I move on, are there any questions? Yeah, so that's so great. I love the image that you showed how a hail is produced because some of the questions that we've had was, how does hail start to form? And it shows in the formation of the nucleus growth of an embryo. And then along with this question is, what happens that generate the hail rings? And why does hail come in different sizes? So I'll answer the second question first, why does hail come in different sizes? And basically that is right here on the right here, these different ingredients. So basically, all else being equal, if you had a particle that stayed in the cloud for less time, it would have less resonance time, it would just not grow as much as another stone that stayed there longer. And really what dictates that is the airflow patterns in the thunderstorm. So how fast are the winds both vertically but then also horizontally? Does the airflow pattern sort of just blow the hailstone out of the updraft too quickly? Or does it kind of keep it there and let it grow very large? And then the first question was about the rings. So those rings, when you see clear ice, that means that there's no air bubbles. And that means it was in a special growth condition that we call wet growth in which there's liquid water that didn't freeze right away onto the surface of the stone. The other condition is what we call dry growth. And when you have dry growth, the liquid water freezes instantly when it hits the hailstone. And in doing so it can trap little air bubbles, little nooks and crannies. And those little air bubbles will refract the light that we see visually and kind of give you this cloudy appearance. And so depending on those different growth conditions, so the temperature the hailstone is experiencing, how much of the super cool liquid water it's experiencing, it will kind of dictate which types of growth regimes will arise. And so every, just like every snowflake is unique, every hailstone is unique, it's not quite as poetic when you think about hailstones because they're kind of lumpy and weird looking, but I think it's kind of neat to think about it that way too. And there was another question about how do satellites estimate the presence of hail and what proxies do you look at? Because I know Rachel, you mentioned the Doppler on wheels and Matt, you're kind of showing this computer simulation of what happens with hail to be able to grow. Sure. So a satellite estimation of hail is tricky. But basically when the satellite's up in space, it's a different type of remote sensing observation. Unlike a radar that's actually sending or transmitting radiation, the satellite just is sort of like a camera. It's just letting the light of different wavelengths come up to that satellite. And so by looking at the intensity and the sort of temperatures at which that light is originating, so about how high it's a proxy for how high or how tall that thunder cloud is, they can sort of mix some combinations of that empirically to match that up with hail reports in regions where we do know that there's hail. And so basically they come up with this sort of statistical relationship that then says, when you see a cloud that's this tall, there's a really good chance that there's hail there. And so they can use that as sort of a proxy for hail. Awesome. Thank you. And I thought that you have another question on your next slide, which I think we have a poll going about what do you think is the largest hail to ever fall. So again, if you haven't already logged on to Slido, you could participate in this poll. And it correlates to another question that somebody did ask, which is, what is the biggest hail that you've ever seen? So Rachel and Matt, if you can let us know, Victoria did sign on, which I'm pretty sure she'll talk about that largest hail that she's discovered. But what Matt and Rachel, what are the two for you guys? What's the largest hail that you've ever seen, I guess, come down from the sky? Go ahead, Rachel. Oh, okay. For me, only about penny-sized. I haven't seen too large of hail. So only about a penny. The largest I have seen coming from the sky was about the baseball size, which is almost three inches in maximum dimension. And it was actually shattered out my car's windshield. The largest I've held in my hand was 4.48 inches, which is one of the hailstones from the Rolampico Field Project. Well, that's amazing. And to think about a baseball, this is pretty intense. I could see how I can wipe down some windshield. Dan, would you be able to post and show us the poll of what is the largest hailstone that people think has ever fallen? And Matt and Rachel will keep this up on the screen for a bit if you can talk through the results. I think you should be able to see that there are 21 participants in the poll. They're saying eight inches, 10.3 inches, there's some 7.4 inches, 5.5 and 6.7 inches. Yeah, these are all great guesses. So Rachel, do you want to give away the, oh, we have some updates as we come. This is cool. So yes, if you haven't put in your vote yet, please do because this is fun to watch these change. We actually have the reveal in the slide show in a little bit. So if everyone can just wait for the suspense. Sounds good. So just keep on voting and then we'll see what you all think. And then I'll pass it over to you guys again. And Victoria, thank you for joining us. We'll get to you to share your story. Thank you for taking time out of work to join us from Argentina. Back to you Matt and Rachel. All right. Well, let's see. I think I need to reshare my screen here. Stand by. All right, are we back on? We're good? Okay. So while we're letting the poll results come in, we'll go ahead and look at one of the results from this for Lampagos Study in from Victoria's Hailstone actually inspired all of this, was to sort of come up with a classification system for hail sizes. There had been some terms used in literature, but nothing was sort of solidified. And so we have a recent paper in which we tried to sort of delineate these different size categories. So that's what you see here in this table. And we'll kind of step through and I'll show pictures of each to get the sense of what these look like. And then sort of the naming convention that we use. Right here, the second column, you'll see what we call the maximum dimension, how far across that hailstone is. It's in centimeters, but I'll give it an inches as well. Then you also see a reference object here. So if you don't like to think about things in terms of centimeters or inches, you can think about them in terms of standard objects that you might be more familiar with. So the first size class is what we would call small or sub-severe. And that's less than two and a half centimeters or less than about an inch in maximum dimension. So think of a U.S. quarter, 25 cent quarter that you might have. That's about a one inch in maximum dimension. So small hail would look something like this. In this picture you see the hail ruler that we used in Lampagos. And those are centimeters. So that would be kind of as a small hailstone. The next size up is what the National Weather Service in the U.S. would consider to be severe hail, which is greater than or equal to that 2.5 centimeters or one inch metric. And here's again a picture of the same ruler. There's a theme here using the same ruler. And you can see that these are much larger and much more likely to cause damage. Next up is what we call significantly severe. So it's sort of a tack onto severe. And this is now greater than five centimeters or greater than two inches in diameter or maximum dimension. And you can see here's a picture from Lorena where you can see it's about five centimeters or a little more in maximum dimension. This came from Lampagos. This is one of the field observations. So this is when you really start to get damage. And this kind of colloquially has been referred to as a hen egg, but you can kind of think we're approaching almost tennis ball in size at this point. Next category is giant hail. And this is greater than 10 centimeters or greater than about four inches in diameter or maximum dimension. And that's something that's bigger than a softball. The picture that you see here is the one that I had referred to earlier. It was about 4.48 inches in maximum dimension. And this fell during the same storm as Victoria's house stone, which we're going to hear about very soon. And then Rachel and I came up with this new category called gargantuan hail, which is sort of the upper extreme of hail sizes. So greater than 15 centimeters in maximum dimension or greater than six inches. And something like a honeydew melon basically, this is really, really enormous hail. And up on there on the right, you can see a picture of Victoria's house stone. And this is a picture that she took with the ruler here. And you can see it's actually far in excess of 15 centimeters in maximum dimension. I guess I'll take a second to see if there's any more questions or if this makes sense. Yeah, that's amazing. One of the questions that we do have is, do you know what is the longest sustained hail storm on record or in one area? Is it possible to know that? That is an excellent question. So typically, there are a few reports of them aware of hail in a single location lasting for 20 to 30 minutes. And typically the reason why it's not longer than that is because most of the time these storms are moving. There's usually stronger winds as you move higher in the atmosphere and so the clouds will tend to be moving with those winds. In terms of the longest lasting storm, if you were to track the storm, some types of storms known as supercell storms can last for hours. I think there's been some that have reported lasting between eight and 12 hours tracking across multiple states. In general, those storms would be producing hail. They just may not be producing sort of the various sizes, large sizes of hail the entire time. That's actually a question that we just don't know given the fact that we do not have ground measurements typically along the entire path of the storm. That's an excellent question. Yeah, and that's amazing to hear that it can last for so long over so many different states as this storm moves. You mentioned these are different sizes of hail and I notice that summer spherical while Victoria's hail is really spiky. Is there a reason why there's different shapes to these hail stones? That's another great question. And yes, just like I said, every snowflake is unique. Every hailstone is unique as well. So there's a variety of different factors, but it basically depends on how it grows in the thunderstorm. So the ones that tend to be more spherical, that means that usually they were probably tumbling as they were growing so that all different sides were sort of being impacted by the supercool liquid and that liquid was being spread around evenly. Whereas the spiky ones like Victoria's hailstone, those are what we call icicle lobes and they grow very much like icicles would in the winter time where there's some preferred alignment of the stone and the liquid sort of is rushing off in this case, not because of gravity, but because of the strong flow going past the stone as it's falling and that will sort of allow it to extend out in one direction or another. But it's a very complicated and open question about how hailstones fall because once you start adding a lobe like that, it's going to change its center of mass and it's going to start changing the way it's oriented since it gets very complicated. That's awesome. And you mentioned that Victoria's hailstone and these reports of hail were in Via Carlos Paz. Is that one of the reasons you chose Argentina to do this type of field work? Because there's a question about how do you actually select the area for field operations? Another great question. So the location was chosen based on several decades of research leading up to this field campaign. Knowing that we see things from satellite, we have reports in local media newspapers. So this was sort of a choice that was made prior to the 2018 hailstone and prior to that field campaign. And it just so happened that they decided, it wasn't my idea, but the leader of the project, Dr. Steven Nesbitt from Illinois, decided to have Via Carlos Paz as the headquarters for the project. And then after that decision was made, almost like the atmosphere was thanking us for making a decision that made that very large hailstone that Victoria experienced. Great. Thank you. And let's keep moving since I noticed it's 3.30. Having too much fun with hail. So this study that Rachel and I and some collaborators put together on Gargantuan hail, you may have seen it in some of the media. This was a Penn State news story that was written up. It then was then shared on the International News Atlas in part because some of the really interesting findings in that study was trying to look at social media posts, videos of the large hail falling and actually using those videos to what we call photogrammetrically analyze or estimate the hail sizes. So this kind of leaves us back, I think, to the question of what is the largest hail that has ever fallen? Should we close out the poll and see? Yeah, Dan, can you let us know what was the results for the poll question of when is the largest hail that's ever fallen? All right. So it looks like the audience is well versed in hail. So indeed, 8 inches in maximum dimension is the official world record. So I will jump back in here. We're back on this. Yes. So the official record came from actually Vivian, South Dakota, and this is a picture of that hailstone, 8 inches in maximum dimension. But that study that Rachel and I did and Visha Carlos us, we looked at those videos and estimated potentially the hailstone that might have been somewhere between 8.9 and 11.1 inches in maximum dimension, which if that were actually officially recorded, that would have been the world record. Unfortunately, it was just a video. So the hailstone is long gone and no one ever went to retrieve it. So we don't know for sure. So with that, I will turn it over to Victoria. And yeah, thank you Victoria for joining us. Again, you're coming, she's coming to us from Argentina. And then Matt, if you could just mute your microphone, we'll hand it over to Victoria. If you can tell us a little bit about. Hi. Hi. So you are, you and your family found this huge hailstone. Can you tell us a little bit about what were you doing when this hailstone, like this hailstorm happened? Can you hear me? I can hear you well. Okay. Okay, I was working. It was between 5pm, 6pm. I don't remember, but it started to rain, started to rain, and then started to the hailstorm, but it was this, and it was pretty calm, just to a hailstorm in summer. And then it started to get bigger, the hail, it started to get bigger. And we were, oh no, and we should put it in the carriage. We were pretty scared because it was like, like the size of a tennis ball. And then it started to, we started to look out for the window. And we saw, with my family, we saw a giant hail that fell. And we saw that around. And it was, I wanted to pick up, to look out. And we, I had a helmet on my head. And I went to pick up the giant hail. That is awesome. And I do have the video, we have it in our Explorer Series videos, but if it's okay with you all, I can share the video real quick. Yeah, cool. So I will put it on full screen, but to preface this again, this is in your house, in your backyard. And it's pretty intense to know that you ran out there, even though like a bicycle helmet, and you had mentioned an umbrella, as protection might not always, always work. So I'm happy that you were safe. Yeah. Yeah, it was scary, but I don't know, I did. That's so great that, like, you can be safe. So I have here the video, I'm hoping you all can see it. And I'm just going to play it real quick. You might be able to hear the pounding. And this is just one part of a hailstone that you all found. So that, it's just amateur recording, just finding it. And what you saw is a piece of hail here. And it's just a broken, because there's another piece over there. Yeah. Yeah. So was this the hail that you found? Was that the entire piece, or was it only part of the piece? No. We think that it was just a part, mashed on the ground. And we saw like, when it's like, how to smash. Yeah, that's pretty amazing. Because technically that means it could have been even larger coming down before it even smashed. Yeah. Thank you so much for sharing your story. It was pretty heavy. I mean, when I held it with my hand, it was heavy. And we were impressed because it was very spiky. So we never saw like a hail like. That's so awesome. Thank you so much. And with that, we'll turn it back to Matt and Rachel to continue talking a little bit more about hail and how people can get involved in reporting these hail events. Thank you, Victoria. Bye. So I will share my screen again. Can we see this? Okay. All right. So why are hail data important? We talked a lot about hail and collecting it and studying it. But what is the significance? So firstly, hail data is important for research. So we need accurate hail data to allow scientists to make the discoveries on how these storms actually produce gargantuan or smaller hail. So getting all of that hail data allows us to make those discoveries. It's important for now casting. So receiving hail data in real time allows forecasters to issue more accurate and timely warning. So forecasters are looking at a storm on radar and they're wondering if it's producing hail. Receiving hail data allows it to be a more accurate warning. Hail data also helps with forecasting. So receiving hail data from the public allows the forecasters to think about those storms and understand them a little bit better before maybe the event is happening and research it. And then when the event does happen, then move into the now casting regime, they have a better understanding for these particular storms and what hail they may be producing. And then, of course, just better science. There's no such thing as too much data. So receiving more data and more accurate data of hail will allow further discoveries in science to happen and further pursuit of those discoveries and then that improves both science and forecasting and research and everything in between. So hail data is just important all around. And how can you get involved if you want to report hail data? So obviously we talked about hail data being extremely important for scientists and forecasters and for research and your data does matter. So we need your data and the public is actually where we get most of the data. So public data is used for most of the research and improving forecasting. For my research in particular, most of the data that I was using actually came from public reports. So if the public weren't reporting those particular hail stones, I wouldn't be able to do the research that I did in graduate school. So public data is extremely important. We encourage everyone to report their weather observations. So if you want to report your data, at least from the National Weather Service perspective, you can go find your local National Weather Service office. It might not be right near you, but at least will be within a few miles maybe of where your location is and go to weather.gov to do this. And then you can send your reports via phone, social media, Facebook or Twitter or an online form from some offices. They do actually have an online form. So just a quick tutorial. This is for at least where I live. So if you go to weather.gov, you're presented with this beautiful map of the U.S. right when you see it in the screen. So if you click on the map where you're located, so a little box will highlight where you're clicking and that will actually bring you to the webpage that you are trying to access. So this is going to be for me at least. This will show me the National Weather Service for State College PA. And if I scroll all the way to the bottom, I will see the address and the phone number. So if I had a report that I was outside, I saw hail or any other weather observations I wanted to report, I could call that number, speak to a forecaster and tell them my report. There's also on the State College page, if you go to Current Hazards, drop down menu comes up and then at the bottom there's send a report. Not every office has this option. And it's going to be in a different location for your particular office. But look for that if you want to just send it online. Also, social media is a great way to do reports of many, many research and other data is collected through social media, essentially. So if you have a photo that you took and you just want to put it on Twitter or Facebook, just at least mention the location, the time and the size and we'll find it. And then we can go in and collect it and use it for research. So if you just want to post it to social media, that's also a great option. You can also see your data in real time if you do decide to report it officially. If you call the National Weather Service or you send in a form online, you can see in real time. So if you go to the spc.noah.gov, you can navigate to storm reports and then you can pull up the official storm reports in this image on the left here. And then if you go to the top of that page and click on unfiltered reports or Esri maps, you'll actually be able to scroll into all those different little icons, click on wherever your location is, and it'll actually pop up with whatever you told us. So if you said that you're reporting three inch hail at the intersection of 120 and root 90, then we'll actually be able to see that on your comments and you can go in and see it yourself. So if you're ever reporting data or if you have reported data, I didn't know this was an option for you, you can actually go in and see your own reports being told here in real time. So if you're interested in reporting hail, there are some conditions that we would ask of you to report. First, take note of the time that it fell. Time is very important when we go back and look at radar data to be able to get accurate information about the storm. So pull out your phone, take out your watch, take note of the time, and then also take note of your location. What is your latitude and longitude? If you don't know your latitude and longitude at that moment, you can just take note of the intersection that you're on your street. If you're at home, just tell us where your home is and we'll find the latitude and longitude, but location is also very important. And then size. So slap down a ruler or a common object such as coins or dollar bill and get an accurate measurement of the hail size. And then finally, if you can, send us a picture. Send us a picture of the hailstone with a ruler or common object and then send it to us. Because as you see here, this is from the Rilampago Field Campaign. Having pictures is really helpful, not only for sizing, but also knowing the environment. So as we can see here in this picture, some of those hailstones are clear, more clear than others. Some of them are more cloudy. And Dr. Cummins talked earlier about how that's signifying either wet or dry growth. That actually is telling us a lot about the different micro physical conditions in the supercell that's helped leading to that different hailstone formation. So even though they're all the same size, they didn't all take the same path because they kind of look different. Also, if you're hail spiky, that's also really important for us to know because those spikes actually increase the hail size quite a bit. Okay. And then finally, you can make your own hail pads. So I will pass this off to Lorena very soon, but it's really easy. You just need three things. You need a styrofoam block or square, need some tinfoil, and you need some tape. So there's actually a link at the bottom there of how to make your own hail pad. And I believe this link is shared somewhere else too, if you're interested in making one. And all you have to do is put it outside and wait. So you'll get imprints of hailstones in there. It's actually fairly accurate. So if you do get a hail storm and it starts making impressions in your hail pad, you can put your ruler down and get an accurate sizing of what hail fell. For this particular pad, you can see that there's all sorts of different sizes. We have large hail, small hail, and everything in between. So it's really cool to also get a distribution of what actually passed over your house. You know, maybe it was all large hail, maybe it was all small hail, but maybe it was like this where you had a variety just like in this picture here. So I think with that, I'll pass it over to Lorena. Awesome. This is a lot of information. And I'm so glad that there are ways that people can help report these hailstone events, including using a ruler, centimeters or inches. If it has both, then you get them to see both of them, taking pictures of them and uploading them to the website. I know there's also research that talks about the depth of the depth of how much hail occurred. So there's more information on that as well on the UCAR and CAR website. But one of the questions that we had was if we can show an example of the cross section or what does the stone look like in the middle. And I just wanted to share real quick from a study that was done in the University of Córdoba in Argentina. And this shows essentially the victorious hailstone. And it is cut in half. And you can see the rings that are concentric to the center. And Matt, you had mentioned some are opaque, some are darker. And there's all the spiky parts of the hail, which again, as I understand it, it's because the hailstone is not rotating within the thunderstorms, it's allowing for these spikes to start to form, which is pretty amazing to see. And there are so many more opportunities for people to continue to do this type of research investigations. So if anybody out there is interested in this type of work, there's so many questions still to be answered, especially why do these form in specific parts of the world and not others. We do see some large hailstones within the United States, but why isn't it as common as in other places in the world? I know we have a lot more questions on Slido that we can answer during this timeframe. So if anybody wants to stick around, we can answer those questions on Slido via texting. So I've been responding to some of the questions that people have been leaving us. And is there any final words, Rachel and Matt, that you'd like to share with our audience if anybody's interested in this type of work? Well, sure. Yeah. As Lorna said, there's a lot of open questions here still. It's an exciting field. It's an exciting time to be in this field. So if you have an interest in this stuff, you can check out a lot of the information that's on the NCAR, UCAR website. You could kind of dig into some of the science that they're doing there and then we're doing around the world. So get out there and take pictures, send us information, and kind of follow that passion and curiosity. Yeah. I second what Dr. Cummins said and also just report everything you see. Again, there's no such thing as too much data. So if you see a gargantuan hailstone or any sort of hailstone that you is falling, any funky shapes, sizes, everything alike, we want to see that. So take a picture, put a ruler down, put a standard object down. I know some people are asking about is a credit card okay? Yeah, that's fine. Use a credit card. That's a standard object too. So anything that you can report to us would be excellent. That just increases the database and then it increases possibility for research. So if you are interested in researching, then you have more data at your fingertips to use and understand these storms. Okay. And we'll leave you off with a fun question and then we'll show the word cloud. One of the fun questions, a yes or no maybe, is if gargantuan, if there's hail that comes down and it lands on clean surface, is it okay to eat it as part of an ice cube on your drink? I've done it before so I'll say yes. Sounds good. And Dan, can you show us, what is the word cloud? When people think of the word hail, what comes to mind? And we'll close with that. We think of damage, ice, wet growth, waiting under a tree. Tree branches might fall though, so it might not be the best place. Damage and lots of money. There's a lot of issues, so mitigating the damage from hail, definitely important for this type of work. So thank you so much, everybody, for joining us today. And thank you, Dr. Akumjian and Rachel and Victoria for joining us in this conversation. We look forward to continuing to see the research that comes out from your work. And definitely Google the gargantuan hail paper to learn more about the research that's taking place. We look forward to seeing you at a future event and we'll see you soon.