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Giant hail and damaging winds in Texas

By Scott Bachmeier •

1-minute GOES-19 “Red” Visible (0.64 µm, top) and “Clean” Infrared Window (10.3 µm, bottom) images with time-matched (+/- 3 minutes) SPC Storm Reports plotted in red/white, from 1920 UTC on 29 April to 0010 UTC on 30 April [click to play animated GIF | MP4]

1-minute Mesoscale Domain Sector GOES-19 (GOES-East) “Red” Visible (0.64 µm) and “Clean” Infrared Window (10.3 µm) images (above) showed thunderstorms that produced giant hail (as large as 5.00 inches in diameter) and damaging wind gusts (as high as 106 mph) across the Texas Panhandle and North Texas (SPC Storm Reports) on 29 April 2025. The Infrared images revealed pulses of thunderstorm overshooting tops that exhibited 10.3 µm brightness temperatures as cold as -78ºC (brighter white pixels embedded within dark black regions) — and the signature of an Above-Anvil Cirrus Plume (reference) was evident in Visible imagery (although the warmer AACP signature was less distinct in the lower-resolution Infrared images).

According to a plot of rawinsonde data (source) from Fort Worth, Texas at 0000 UTC on 30 April (below), the coldest GOES-19 cloud-top infrared brightness temperature of -78ºC represented a ~1.5 km overshoot of the Most Unstable air parcel Equilibrium Level (MU EL).

Plot of rawinsonde data from Fort Worth, Texas at 0000 UTC on 30 April [click to enlarge]

GOES-19 Visible images with plots of GLM Flash Points (below) displayed abundant lightning activity associated with these supercell thunderstorms — which were generally focused in the vicinity of a quasi-stationary frontal boundary.

1-minute GOES-19 Visible (0.64 µm) images with plots of 1-minute GOES-19 GLM Flash Points, from 1910 UTC on 29 April to 0009 UTC on 30 April [click to play MP4 animation]

Categories: GLM, GOES-19, Lightning, Severe convection