What are the strange weather phenomena?
In the ever-changing weather phenomena, there are often some unusual cases. These individual cases may only occur once in decades or hundreds of years, or they may even be strange phenomena that occur once in a thousand years and will never recur. They transcend the general laws of weather changes and become "treasures" in meteorological science. These extremely unusual weather phenomena have greatly broadened people's horizons and enriched the treasure house of human astronomical knowledge.
In the middle of winter, you can often see snowflakes flying all over the sky in most parts of our country. These white, fluffy snowflakes are light and small, no bigger than goose feathers. However, on January 10, 1915, Berlin, Germany, experienced an amazing snowfall. The snowflakes were as big as a saucer, with a diameter of 8 to 10 centimeters, and were shaped like a saucer, with the edges pointing upward. , so it is called "snow dish". When it falls from the sky, it falls much faster than other small snowflakes around it and is less affected by the wind; to people on the ground, it looks like some white saucers falling from the sky. When it fell to the ground, none of the snow dishes turned upside down.
As early as 1887, a "snow saucer" phenomenon also occurred in the UK. The temperature that day was just above freezing and the relative humidity was saturated (100%). When it first snowed, the snowflakes were not too big, and then gradually became larger, with the diameter increasing from 6.5 cm to 7 cm, and finally reaching 9 cm. At that time, someone divided the collected snow disks into groups of 10, and weighed each group between 1.1 and 1.4 grams, hundreds of times heavier than ordinary snow flakes.
What’s more, in the winter of 1887, near a farm in a mountainous area of Montana, in the northwest United States, the snowflakes I saw were incredibly large, reaching 38 centimeters in diameter and 20 centimeters thick. It is bigger than the local milk pot used to boil milk.
It is speculated that these extra large snowflakes may be caused by the larger snowflakes adsorbing smaller snowflakes due to their fast speed during the falling process, similar to a "snowball".
Hail
In natural disasters, hail often brings us huge losses. On July 13, 1788, a hailstorm swept across most of France from the southwest to the northeast. Millions of tons of ice poured down from the sky. The largest hailstones weighed half a catty. In areas where hail fell, large livestock were injured and small livestock were killed. Wild birds have not been seen in the forest for a long time. Crops, fruit trees, and trees were beaten to pieces and littered the ground.
In March 1968, a hailstorm in Bihar, India, weighed 2 pounds and killed a calf on the spot. For India, such a large hailstone also occurred once in May 1929. The diameter of the hailstone was 13 centimeters and the weight was 2 pounds.
On the afternoon of May 11, 1894, a hailstorm occurred in Vicksburg, USA. The hailstones were very large, and the cores of these hailstones were not condensed by supercooled water droplets and ice crystals, but by a Composed of blocks of alabaster, these solid cores are each 1.3 to 1.9 centimeters. A hailstorm also occurred in Bovenna, 8 miles east of the city. One of the hailstones was quite large, with a diameter of 15.2 to 20.3 centimeters. What was even more surprising was that there was a turtle inside the hailstone (this is the southern part of the United States). A burrowing edible turtle), it was tightly surrounded by ice and trapped in the hail, like a tiny insect in amber. On that day, these areas were at the southern edge of the cold air-controlled area. The atmospheric stratification was extremely unstable, and strong cyclones or gusts appeared. It can be imagined that the turtle is soaring from the ground into the sky with the help of a whirlwind. In the churning sea of clouds, it is regarded as the heart of hail and surrounded by layers of ice and snow. It gets bigger and bigger until the updraft can no longer support it. The chunks fell to the ground and became a curious event in the history of hail.