Mexico Hailstorm Blankets Western Areas Under 3 Feet of Ice
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/01/world/americas/mexico-hail-storm-guadalajara.html
Source: By Iliana Magra, The New York Times.
Excerpt: The photographs that emerged from western Mexico on Sunday looked more like scenes from a post-apocalyptic movie than an image of the last day of June: hills of white hailstones piled up on the streets, swallowing cars and blanketing the city in a jarring layer of ice. The hail, which accumulated up to three feet high in some parts of Jalisco State on Mexico’s Pacific Coast, baffled the authorities who tried to find a way to clean up the icy mess. Enrique Alfaro, the governor of Jalisco, wrote on Twitter that he had never seen anything like it. “I witnessed scenes that I had never seen before: hail more than a meter high,” he tweeted, “and then we ask ourselves if climate change exists.” ...Chris Westbrook, a meteorologist at the University of Reading in Britain, said the hail was a result of warm, moist air rising into the atmosphere and rapidly cooling to form heavy balls of ice before plunging back to earth. And mountainous regions like Guadalajara are ripe for this phenomenon. “Fundamentally, hailstorms are not unusual in this part of the world,” he said in an email. “What is unusual is that the conditions were just right to get an awful lot in one go.”....
Source: By Iliana Magra, The New York Times.
Excerpt: The photographs that emerged from western Mexico on Sunday looked more like scenes from a post-apocalyptic movie than an image of the last day of June: hills of white hailstones piled up on the streets, swallowing cars and blanketing the city in a jarring layer of ice. The hail, which accumulated up to three feet high in some parts of Jalisco State on Mexico’s Pacific Coast, baffled the authorities who tried to find a way to clean up the icy mess. Enrique Alfaro, the governor of Jalisco, wrote on Twitter that he had never seen anything like it. “I witnessed scenes that I had never seen before: hail more than a meter high,” he tweeted, “and then we ask ourselves if climate change exists.” ...Chris Westbrook, a meteorologist at the University of Reading in Britain, said the hail was a result of warm, moist air rising into the atmosphere and rapidly cooling to form heavy balls of ice before plunging back to earth. And mountainous regions like Guadalajara are ripe for this phenomenon. “Fundamentally, hailstorms are not unusual in this part of the world,” he said in an email. “What is unusual is that the conditions were just right to get an awful lot in one go.”....