July 5
Suspecting something might boil up and slide out of the foothills this afternoon, we headed for Olds around 1 to see what was happening down that way. Nothing but some pretty cumulus around as we wandered along over Eagle Hill and back towards home thru Kevisville. We could see a few high based cells trying to get going to the north, but decided to call it a day by 5.
Just got home and checked the radar to see a cell erupting northwest of Caroline again, so we hopped back in the car and headed west for a look. As soon as we turned west, the cell split, with one heading northwest and the other ESE. We chose the middle and drove up between them. The north cell quickly built up, then fell out just as fast. Once there was a bit of separation, the south cell flared up and started to drop what looked like hail from a distance so we cut around the back of it and started to follow it back towards home. By this time it was dropping some serious precip and appeared to be heading right for the flower patch, so we decided to try the edge of the core and see it we could scoot south of it and get home for the save.
No such luck. A few miles east of Spruceview, just into the south edge of the core, we hit torrential rain, then a deluge of pea and slightly larger hail. Could barely see the windshield wipers so we piled into the first approach we could find which luckily was a driveway lined with big spruce trees. Amazing downpour of ice that lasted a good4 or 5 minutes and left a few inches on the ground. It’s been a while since we’ve seen hail like that. The cell was moving slowly, so we headed back west a few miles then north 4 and blew back east past it, beating it here, where we only got 1mm of rain. It displayed some nice structure as it passed just north of Innisail before fizzling out.
Looking back at the radar, it tracked straight down the north side of hwy#54, laying down a parallel hail track to yesterday’s storm, immediately to the south. We had a scope around for damage from yesterday while we were cruising around, but the crops are a bit behind and that seemed to have saved them from serious harm. A few leaves laying around in the canola patch and some shredded poplar leaves on the roads, but not much else that we could see.
