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Severe thunderstorms produce giant hail and isolated tornadoes in the Southern Plains

By Scott Bachmeier •

1-minute GOES-19 “Red” Visible (0.64 µm, left) and “Clean” Infrared Window (10.3 µm, right) images with time-matched (+/- 3 minutes) SPC Storm Reports plotted in red/cyan, from 2130 UTC on 08 September to 0030 UTC on 09 September [click to play animated GIF | MP4]

1-minute Mesoscale Domain Sector GOES-19 (GOES-East) Visible and Infrared images (above) included time-matched (+/- 3 minutes) SPC Storm Reports — which showed discrete supercell thunderstorms that produced giant hail (as large as 4.00 inches in diameter in southwest Kansas at 2215 UTC and 2343 UTC, and 3.50 inches in diameter in the northeast Texas Panhandle at 2352 UTC) on 08 September 2025. There were also tornadoes at 2257 UTC in Oklahoma and at 0005 UTC in Texas.

Pulses of overshooting tops exhibited infrared brightness temperatures as cold as -75ºC — which represented a ~2 km overshoot of the Most Unstable (MU) air parcel’s Equilibrium Level (EL), according to 0000 UTC rawinsonde data from Amarillo, Texas (below).

Plot of rawinsonde data from Amarillo, Texas at 0000 UTC on 09 September [click to enlarge]

Categories: GOES-19, Severe convection