Around 12pm storms began to erupt across the I-40 corridor, and I was interested to see if a stronger more organized cell could develop. One cell deviated in motion a little to the right of the mean flow, and moved towards Munds Park. I jetted down I-17 to try and catch it, it was still kinda weak at that point and not the most promising storm I've ever seen, but I figured why not, its my day off. Little did I know it would really take off as I approached it. Below is the radar image of the storm as its moved towards me, I'm basically where the pink is, indicating probable hail. It even has a bit of a supercell structure to it, but that's just speculation without a high res velocity image, which I lack when I am not working.
When I got to Munds Park, a nice shelf cloud was moving in from the west, rather quickly, with nearly constant cloud to ground lightning strokes. I pulled into a gas station parking lot and took some pics, managed to catch a lightning strike even!
I drove further south of Munds Park a few minutes later to catch a better view of the shelf cloud, but if your travel too far south you fall of the edge of the Mogollon Rim into the desert, and I wanted to stay on the higher terrain. The clouds were very agitated in appearance, with a slight tinge in color which was rather ominous.
So then I moved back towards Munds Park, when it really let loose. I pulled into the Chevron Parking lot and saw a lightning strike no more than 300 feet away right behind the building, I don't know if I've even been so close while looking the right direction. It was AWESOME! It really started to hail so I decided to travel south to try and avoid hail damage on my brand new car, but the hail ended up getting bigger (Sometimes I wish I had mobile internet to know these things), so I pulled off about 2 miles south where the hail had begun to rapidly accumulate.
As the hail let up, I took some pictures of the hail and motorists hiding under overpasses from the hail. The hail was 3-4 inches deep at some places on I-17 southbound. Pretty cool stuff! Most of the hail was between nickel and quarters, so nearly 1 inch hail. Wouldn't be surprised at all if a few stones out there approached 1.5" or so. I did hear a couple very loud bangs on my Kia, but no damage fortunately.
Headed back to Flag around 230pm and took some pics of nice hail fog on the way back. With the weather pattern not changing a whole lot in the next few days, I'm hoping to catch some more cool storms on my 3 day weekend! Finally, I'll attach a video of the hail storm at its peak when I pulled off on Schnebly hill Road and waited for the hail to subside, pretty intense!
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