WICHITA – The National Weather Service has issued a heat advisory for 11 counties in southern Kansas, including Wichita and portions of the metropolitan area.
The advisory is in effect until 8 p.m. and includes Butler, Kingman, Sedgwick, Harper, Sumner, Cowley, Elk, Wilson, Chautauqua, Montgomery and Labette counties.
Among the cities included in the advisory are El Dorado, Augusta, Kingman, Anthony, Harper, Wellington, Winfield, Arkansas City, Chanute, Coffeyville and Parsons.
With high humidity levels and temperatures soaring above 100, the heat index is expected to top 105 in portions of southern Kansas, weather service officials said.
While it was the large hail that deservedly turned the most heads during the intense thunderstorm that rapidly developed near Wichita Wednesday night and hammered the city, the storm featured plenty of lightning, too.
It was fascinating to see the storm blossom out of seemingly nowhere. Within minutes, the lightning intensified from quick flickers in the clouds to many large, bright bolts down to the ground.
What amazed me was how many people were still walking the dog or going for a jog in northwest Wichita even as large lightning bolts were clearly visible perhaps a mile or two away.
Jack Huber shared these lightning shots from his home in southwest Wichita, looking north and east of his back porch.
In a blogpost about the Wingnuts game at Lawrence Dumont Stadium Wednesday night, Eagle colleague Jeff Lutz added this:
The thing I can’t figure out, though — and it’s kind of a “speaking the obvious” thing. But why is hail cold? I get that it’s ice. But it was 85 degrees last night. What’s going on up in the sky to not only turn water to ice in midair, but also make it cold? I’m sure it has something to do with atmospheric pressure or something like that, but it’s one of those things that seems obvious yet no layperson really has an answer for.
Actually, Jeff, there is an answer. Hail is cold because it’s ice. Hail is ice because it forms in layers of the atmosphere where the temperature is below freezing. As the ice crystals are buffeted around in the upper levels of the thunderstorm, they gradually accumulate moisture that also freezes, making the stone larger.
The stones fall toward the earth, but if the updrafts in the storm are strong enough they’ll push the stones back up into the upper levels again, where the process repeats itself: moisture attaches itself to the stone and freezes, making it even larger.
Eventually, the stones become too heavy to be kept aloft, and they fall to the ground. The larger the hail stones, the stronger the updrafts aloft in the thunderstorm.
That’s why large hail is one marker of an impending tornado: the same updrafts that make the large hail possible can be an ingredient in the formation of a tornado – though not every thunderstorm that produces hail is capable of developing a tornado, and not every tornadic thunderstorm has hail in it.
The temperatures near the surface of the ground – where we are – have no real bearing on the formation of hail. They merely have a say on how quickly the stones melt.
WICHITA – The metropolitan area ducked the century mark Thursday, but Wichita doesn’t look to be that fortunate on the final day of the work week.
Forecasters are calling for temperatures of around 101 in Wichita today, with clear skies and hearty south winds. Those winds will be steady in the teens, with gusts to almost 30 miles an hour.
A chance of showers arrives again tonight and early Saturday as a cool front slides through Kansas. Any temperature relief will be short-lived, however, with highs expected to persist at or near 100.
Wichita has recorded only one 100-degree day so far this summer, and that was 101 on June 25. Thursday’s high was 96.