Storm brings large hail

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 03/10/2023 (466 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Carey and Richard Marshall are surveying the damage that ping pong ball-sized hail caused to their vehicles Sunday night at their Oakburn home, which is about an hour and 15 minutes northwest of Brandon.

“Both our truck and car have damage. My husband also checked the camper, but we know that the cover on the back of the truck is going to have to be replaced. And there are dents on our vehicle,” Marshall said.

Marshall said she was sound asleep when the thunderstorm woke her up at about 10:30 p.m., but most of all, it was the noise from the hail. That’s when she said she went to look at their back deck.

“The whole deck was covered in hail; it was all white. And the pieces were pretty close to that bigger size of a ping pong ball, and they were bouncing off the deck and hitting the window, so yeah, it was loud,” Marshall said.

At about the same time, also in Oakburn, Amanda Meir snapped a photo of the two hailstones she collected from her yard.

Meir said, naturally she has seen storms before, but it has been a while.

“It was last June or July that we had a big hailstorm like this. Sunday night was so loud that it sounded like someone was on the roof with a sledgehammer.”

The severe thunderstorm appeared on the weather radar in Saskatchewan Sunday at about 7 p.m., showing it was heading east.

By 7:45 p.m., Environment and Climate Change Canada had issued a severe thunderstorm warning for Russell, Binscarth and Riding Mountain West, with a description that included: “Meteorologists are tracking a cluster of severe thunderstorms capable of producing very strong wind gusts, up to nickel-size hail and heavy rain.”

Subsequent warnings were sent out at 8:20 and 8:30 p.m., as the storm continued its path into Manitoba picking up speed, “moving northeast at 60 km/h,” according to Environment and Climate Change Canada’s website.

Marshall said looking back at their summer, they hardly had any storms around Oakburn, and added, when there are watches and warnings for Riding Mountain and Brandon, “the storms always miss us.”

“I was watching the sky from a distance, and I could see the lightning and thought, ‘oh that’s going to miss us, great,’ but no,” Marshall said, “It hit us.”

“But it’s fall,” Marshall added, “This is not right for the beginning of October.”

While it’s unusual to see such severe weather in October, it’s not impossible, said Rose Carlsen, a meteorologist with Environment and Climate Change Canada.

“We’re certainly in a down season for severe weather, but it’s not unheard of, especially in Canada,” Carlsen said. “We refer to these as shoulder seasons when we’re starting to transition.

“We can still have warm days here, and we’re still seeing a lot of moisture being moved into the area,” Carlsen said.

The dominant weather pattern affecting the southwestern part of the province, added Carlsen, is a large low-pressure system.

That low is sitting over the western part of the United States and is drawing warm air all the way from Mexico into Saskatchewan and Manitoba, which means the province is getting warm, moist air.

Additionally, Carlsen said, there was a second system that developed in South Dakota that moved north. Embedded in that system were storms that rode through Manitoba Sunday evening and overnight into the early hours of Monday morning.

“Everybody is used to seeing a thunderstorm, but not everybody’s used to seeing hail come from thunderstorms. So, people get excited about it.

“Hail is an indication of significant severe weather and can indicate a longer lifetime of a thunderstorm. The larger hailstones are generally an indication of what we call the updraft in a thunderstorm. That’s the mechanism that is allowing the thunderstorm to rotate and lift. So, large hailstones mean a pretty strong updraft,” Carlsen said.

Tracking the storm as soon as it was spotted on the Saskatchewan Manitoba border was Justin Oertel, owner of the Manitoba Weather Centre since 2013.

In 10 years, Oertel has gained more than 100,000 followers on his Facebook pages, including the Manitoba Weather Centre storm reports.

People are encouraged to post photos and updates, as the weather events are unfolding.

“We have people from all across southern, central and northern Manitoba that are able to publish what they’re seeing in real time, and it really helps us out when we’re forecasting,” Oertel said.

Oertel uses radar and satellite imagery to follow and forecast the weather, but he said it’s the human factor and the local updates that matter most.

“The radar may be showing that a storm is rotating up in the upper levels, but you need that ground-level reporting to really know if that rotation is actually reaching ground level, or if it’s staying up and, in the clouds,” Oertel said.

The weather outlook for fall in Manitoba and Saskatchewan will be “fickle,” according to Doug Gillham, a senior meteorologist with the Weather Network.

“A mild fall is expected across both the two provinces, along with near-normal precipitation totals. However, we are watching the potential for a stretch of colder than normal temperatures, especially across eastern parts of the region during the heart of the season. This could include a few shots of significant early winter-like weather,” Gillham wrote on the weather service’s website.

“While winter will taunt us at times, we expect temperatures to return to average during November and continue to dominate through most of December.”

» [email protected]

» X: @enviromichele