Hailstorm Damage Observed from theGOES-8Satellite: The 5–6 July 1996 Butte–Meade Storm

Evaluation of approaches to identifying hail damage to crop vegetation using satellite imagery

“…The outer kernel is 50 km  50 km, and anomalies are calculated as the difference between the inner-kernel pixels and the median of cloud-free observations in the outer kernel. The 12.5 km  12.5 km inner kernel is large enough to resolve the typical 7-12-km width of previously documented hail swaths (Frisby 1963;Klimowski et al 1998;Parker et al 2005) when compared to the surrounding background, but could miss smaller features. Figure 4 shows how both kernels move throughout the image to calculate the anomalies, shifting 12.5 km through each iteration (first west-to-east before shifting north once the iterator reaches the end of the domain).…”

“…Remote sensing of hail and severe weather damage to crops has been well-documented. Klimowski et al (1998) used the Geostationary Operational Environmental to observe hail damage in South Dakota. GOES-8 only provided visible wavelength (0.52-0.72 µm) imagery with 1-km spatial resolution at nadir.…”

Assessment of Hailstorm Damage in Wheat Crop Using Remote Sensing

“…An early example of hail damage detection from satellite remote sensing was the use of visible band of the GOES-8 to identify surface damage along a 120 km path of 'almost complete vegetative defoliation and destruction' in western South Dakota, USA that was caused by large hail (>5 cm) and severe winds (>50 m s -1 ), including complete devastation of range grasses, planted crops and extensive defoliation of trees 3 . Later, remote sensingbased normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) was used in hailstorm and wind damage assessment [4][5][6] .…”

“…A changing climate leads to changes in the attributes of extreme events (frequency, intensity, spatial extent, duration and timing); hence unprecedented extreme weather and climate events are becoming frequent 2,3 . Impacts from recent climate-related extremes (heat waves, droughts, floods, cyclones, wildfires, etc.)…”

Mesocyclone Evolution and Differences between Isolated and Embedded Supercells

“…Supercell thunderstorms are perhaps the most violent of all thunderstorm types, and are capable of producing damaging winds, large hail, weak-to-violent tornadoes, and flash flooding with severe economic losses [3][4][5]. The definition of a mesocyclone was as given by Burgess [6] and included criteria on the shear value, the depth of the circulation, and its temporal continuity.…”