Favored locations include the south-central United States, southeast South America, and equatorial Africa. Other regions have extreme storms mainly in specific seasons, such as the Sahel, the Indian subcontinent, and northern Australia. Because intense storms are distributed quite differently from rainfall, these maps provide some new metrics for global models, if they are to simulate the type of convection as a component of our climate system.
Sign in Sign up. Advanced Search Help. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. Cited By. Chart I. Get the best experience and stay connected to your community with our Spectrum News app. Learn More. Severe weather season is upon us, with some areas of the country seeing thunderstorms on an almost daily basis. While the warmer seasons can bring storms with hail, rain, damaging winds and even tornadoes, not all storms behave the same way.
Like many things in life, thunderstorms are not one size fits all. Sure, we have severe and non-severe storms, but did you know there are actually four different types of storms? In their infancy, most thunderstorms start off as towering cumulus clouds. Moist parcels of air rise, expand, and cool, causing these clouds to grow. This creates what we call an updraft. Often, the white, wispy look of the growing cloud is replaced by a darker shade. This ominous look is water vapor condensing into ice crystals and water droplets that will later fall as rain.
Since warm moist air can no longer rise, cloud droplets can no longer form. The storm dies out with light rain as the cloud disappears from bottom to top. The whole process takes about one hour for an ordinary thunderstorm. Severe thunderstorms like supercells and squall lines are much larger, more powerful, and last for several hours.
Skip to main content. More About Storms. It is also during the mature stage when the storm is most intense producing strong, gusting winds, heavy precipitation, lightning, and possibly small hail. Once the downdrafts overtake the updrafts, which also prevents the release of latent heat energy, the thunderstorm will begin to weaken into the third and final stage, called the dissipating stage. During this stage, light precipitation and downdrafts become the dominate feature within the cloud as it weakens.
In all, only twenty percent of the moisture within the cloud fell as precipitation whereas the other eighty percent evaporates back into the atmosphere. With severe thunderstorms, the downdrafts are so intense that when they hit the ground it sends warm air from the ground upward into the storm. The warm air gives the convection cells more energy. Rain and hail grow huge before gravity pulls them to Earth. Severe thunderstorms can last for hours and can cause a lot of damage because of high winds, flooding, intense hail, and tornadoes.
Thunderstorms can form individually or in squall lines along a cold front. In the United States, squall lines form in spring and early summer in the Midwest where the maritime tropical mT air mass from the Gulf of Mexico meets the continental polar cP air mass from Canada.
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