Day One of the High Plains Conference

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The theme of today's conference was forecasting very large and destructive hail, a topic that has not received enough attention in the research community.

Because the conference is being held in Wichita, there was, understandably, a lot of focus on the record hail storm that occurred in here last September 15 made famous on this blog for Baby Noggin-Sized Hail.

The supercell thunderstorm that produced the giant hail (7+" in diameter!) was compared to storms that produced similar sized hail in Nebraska and in Kansas for insights into similarities for future forecasting. The papers produced a lot of great information that forecasters can use to create better hail warnings in the future. We also learned about the challenges in getting storm warnings to Spanish-speaking people in the U.S. and a number of other interesting topics.

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