Glad to hear you're safe. Saw that nasty red stuff on the radar pounding your area earlier.

Just up checking the radar for myself here since I hear thunder knocking on our doorstep yet again. Warnings for 60 mph and hail for us with what's coming but the radar doesn't look too terribly scary.

Diane

There is NOTHING more boring than sitting in the tornado shelter, and this is the second time this year! Last time, on Feb. 10th, it was an F-4 tornado a few miles northwest of us, so I am glad we sat that one out....and glad it missed us.

I hope the evil red stuff misses y'all. (It's not like you need more rain, right?)

Dawn

Man - That looks bad. The map shows they are still getting large hail on the south side of the river. I can see a little more SE of McAlaster, but it isn't as big as that in Texas. Can only imagine what that is doing to roofs and vehicles.

How did people measure the size of hail before golfballs and baseballs were invented?

Robert

Carol,

I was thinking of you and your family and the Lone Grove tornado when I left the house for the tornado shelter because the first report of a tornadic circulation was at Petersboro in Montague County--virtually the same spot that the storm which produced the Lone Grove tornado also first appeared on radar before it crossed into western Love County and headed for Lone Grove.

I followed the storms from the tornado shelter via the radar on my laptop (I lost reception, though, when I closed the steel door), a fire radio set on the Love County repeater station, and a weather radio. If the storm had followed the typical tornado pattern of moving from the southwest to the northeast, we would've been hit somewhere between Burneyville and Thackerville, and spotters in both areas did report tornadic circulation that never came down to the ground, thankfully.

This storm, though, headed due east, hooked a little southeast once or twice, then corrected back to due east. We had two major cells move east from Montague County (baseball sized hail and a tornado touchdown) to Cooke County (rain, wind, hail, possible tornado) to Grayson County (golfball to baseball sized hail, tornado near the airport) to Fannin County. I am grateful they went east, and mostly through lightly populated areas. For a while we thought Gainesville was really going to get pounded.

Robert,

LOL I don't know. That would be an interesting thing to figure out. Maybe they described them in terms of inches? I wonder if there are a lot of historical reports of large hail? I can remember very large hail dating back to the late 1970s when I was in high school/college, but I don't remember any prior to that, although I am sure there was some.

Dawn

I was watching it on Tulsa Channel 6 and I had the hail feature turned on. It was skirting the Red River on the south side all the way across there. The map is designed to let us see Oklahoma so there was a label in my way. LOL But I could see the hail jumping back and forth between 1.25 and 1.75 inch diameter before it went behind the map label.

It acted like it was afraid to cross the river. We laugh up here because the same thing happens with I-44. Sometimes the storm follows it all the way up to the state line and doesn't cross I-44. Of course, it probably does but that is the way the map makes it look. That's OK since I live on the other side. LOL

I hope the hail is always afraid to cross the river!

Really, we've been lucky here. Two major hail storms that did massive damage in town have missed us by just a mile or two since we moved here in 1999, and once Thackerville had a big hail storm (looked like snow on the ground as we drove through it) that missed us too. I did have pretty major damage to the landscape about our third year here.....it must have been in May or June because I had golf ball to tennis ball sized fruit on the tomato plants. The plants were just mangled, but only a couple died although most of them had to be pruned back to just a few inches tall in order to remove all the damage. The tomato and pepper harvest were late, but it all worked out. The hail we got on the night of the Lone Grove tornado was BB-sized to pea-sized so it didn't do anything but fall and melt.

Hope y'all are OK up there today. The radar looks yucky for so much of the state.

I've been hit twice by baseball-sized hail--once in college, and I was out driving on the intersate and had nowhere to seek shelter--and once at my parents house maybe a year after that. The damage done by hail that size is indescribable.

The hail feature sounds cool. We don't have that here, but our local CBS affiliate has a storm chaser who works with them and gives them live reports, which can be amazing. He always seems to be right where the funnels touch down, waiting for them to get there. His vehicle did get pounded by the hail. When the TV station started getting hail in Sherman, it got knocked off the air for a few minutes.

Dawn - You can see your area on the map for Channel 6 because it has an option to show the entire state except for the panhandle counties west of Beaver.

Across the top of the map you can set the features that you are interested in watching, i.e. hail, warnings, rotation, etc. It is a little tricky because you check the block to the left although it looks like it should be the one to the right. When there is hail, it will show a little white ball on the map. For small hail the ball will be empty, for penny size it has a "P", and for larger, it has the size. You can set the warnings to see the direction the storm is traveling, etc.

The URL:
http://www.newson6.com/Global/category.asp?C=158741

The site is a little slow, but the info is great.