I moved to Germany recently with my family and I was enjoying the sunny weather here. As a habit of mine, I always look at the sky like some of you and immerse myself in the clouds and describe them to my imagination like a kid.
The photo I shared here is the one I was seeing in the sky with my five year old son with bits and pieces of fluffy cumulus cloud around noon and he said it looks like a playing dog. Then I went back to the part of my life where I happened to work as an Aviation Meteorologist and said him this cloud we say as towering cumulus. In aviation we send in a meteorology message there is a towering cumulus in this direction (like a towering cumulus in the south direction).
Normally when this cloud continues to grow, it brings us thunderstorms or hailstorms by becoming a cumulonimbus cloud.
You can read my blog on cumulonimbus cloud for more details.
Coming to the present story, in the next two hours the sky became dark with thunder and lightning. Since my kid was a bit afraid of the sound we went inside and then my husband said to us hey guys see it's hail storm.
I thought that it was a big raindrop and then he opened our balcony and showed us. I was happy to see the first hail storm of my life and that too with my son. Because it's a new and first experience for both of us. Then my son became very curious and he wants to collect the hails in his hands. Still, it's dangerous if it hits us, so we enjoyed the hail storm by watching them from inside the house and my son collected some from our balcony.
Many of you might have seen and experienced them. This video I am sharing might take you back to those memories and for the persons who have not seen them you can visualize and enjoy them.
See in this first video the sky is almost covered with clouds, this was taken after two hours around 2.30 pm local time from the first photo I shared earlier. You can see the cloud colour and the sky covered in different shades of white and grey.
In this second video, you can hear the sound of hailstorm hitting the objects. This is what I though it has started to rain and the drops are big.
This third video shows the intense rain. For me, it was still like a big raindrop, until we saw them closely.
In this last video, you can see the small hails that is being picked up and enjoyed by my kid.
See he started to fear the thunder sound at first, later the hails amused him and he was so excited to see them more than me. This is where we need to learn to enjoy small things like kids.
Though I enjoyed them, as an agrometeorologist I was also worried about the damage they might have caused to the crops. Hope hailnets were used so damage is reduced.
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