Beautiful Sky, Pelting Hail In Vermont Meant Cold Air Was Lurking

People across Vermont, much of northern New England and northern New York were treated to a pretty sky most of Sunday, with billowing white clouds with interesting shapes and towering lumpy forms that looked like massive dishes of mashed potatoes.

A billowing thunderstorm erupts east of
Georgia, Vermont Sunday afternoon. 

Blue skies mixed with dark cloud bases, and the weather lurched from sunny to rainy, to warm to chilly to windy. Some places got pelted with quite a bit of hail.

That one minute it's here, one minutes it's gone character to Sunday was a sure sign that a pocket of very cold air for this time of year lurked a few thousand feet overhead.

The early August sun is still strong, and heated the atmosphere down where we live, so temperatures were comfortable enough, around 70 degrees. But that cold air lurking overhead meant that warm air near the ground was able to rise quickly and form those big thunderheads and beautiful billowing clouds.

I'm sure there were plenty of Kodak moments with those clouds yesterday.

For the people that got bullseyed by the strongest of the showers and thunderstorms beneath those clouds, hail pelted down. For the most part, the hail wasn't very big, because these weren't strong thunderstorms, but in some cases there was a lot of hail.

Many thunderstorms have hail, but a thick layer of the atmosphere is usually warm enough in the summer so the hail melts on the way down. Unless the thunderstorm is so severe that the hail way up high gets so big it doesn't have time to melt on the way down.

Another view of Sunday's billowing clouds
looking east from Georgia, Vermont

On Sunday, you didn't really have to go that high up to encounter subfreezing air. I'm guessing it hit 32 degree at around 7,000 feet above sea level or so.

I base that guess on the fact it was in the mid-30s yesterday afternoon at the 6,266-foot summit of Mount Washington, New Hampshire.

That meant the hail up in those billowing clouds didn't have a lot of time to melt, so some of us New Englanders and Adirondack residents got some good blasts of hail.

The atmosphere above us is starting to warm up as of Monday noon, and high pressure moving in is encourage sinking, rather than rising air. That means it's still on the cool side around here, but not a lot of clouds. Just beautiful blue skies. So enjoy.