Forumers:
We all know that weather isn't climate, but take a look at this...... These events do happen, but very rarely.
Key to this one was that "precipitable water values were 3 standard deviations above the norm for this time of year."...
"Weather weirding" ..... http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/29/science/earth/arctic-sea-ice-eyed-for-clues-to-weather-extremes.html
is really favouring Texas.
Kind regards,

Mark Kowal

http://www.weather.com/outlook/weather-news/news/articles/feet-of-hail-northwest-texas_2012-04-12

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2128989/Hail-No-Raging-April-storm-leaves-feet-ICE-unbelievable-photos.html
http://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/climate-weather/blogs/photo-4-feet-of-hail-falls-on-west-texas
A small town in Texas was hit with a whopper of a storm Wednesday morning that left four feet of hail in its wake. Officials from the National Weather Service in Amarillo said that the storm was so severe and the hail so unrelenting that a major highway in Potter County was completely covered. But the photos of the one-off event are so unbelievable that an army of online sceptics have cast doubt on their authenticity................





Emacs!

HAIL AND HIGH WATER: A firefighter poses with 4-foot hail drifts on April 11 near Amarillo, Texas. The melting hail has spurred heavy flash flooding in the area. (Photo: National Weather Service)
 
A major spring storm swept through West Texas on Wednesday, offering new evidence that everything really is bigger in the Lone Star state. The storm dumped incredible amounts of hail around Amarillo ­ so much hail, in fact, that many people have declared a photo of the piled-up precipitation to be literally incredible.
 
"Seriously people, he [is] standing in a crevasse between rocks. ... Come on!!" one Facebook commenter wrote. "Looks like another big Texas Tale," another added.
 
But according to Jose Garcia, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Amarillo, this image of tall hail is no tall tale. "Yes, it is real," Garcia tells MNN. "When you get that much hail in a concentrated area, it can pile up like that."
 
Some skeptical commenters have argued the hail looks too gray to be ice, but Garcia says that's just an effect of the region's dry environment: "It's dark in color because there's not much vegetation in the area, so it picked up a lot of dust."
 
The size of these hailstones isn't unusual, Garcia adds ­ they're only pea-sized. What separated this from a typical hail storm was the amount of hail, combined with the storm's slow pace through the sky. "I think this was just one of those weird storms that just sat here and came down extremely heavy in this one area," Potter County Sheriff Brian Thomas told Amarillo's KAMR-TV Wednesday.
 
Not only was all this hail not a joke, but it also wasn't a laughing matter. With 2 to 4 feet of ice falling from the sky, visibility plummeted and many roads became unsafe for traffic. "Heavy rain and up to 4 ft of hail has US 287 blocked north of Amarillo," the Texas Department of Transportation tweeted Wednesday night. Snow plows were reportedly called in to clear hail from some roads.
 
The danger didn't end when the hail stopped falling, either. West Texas isn't very cold in April, so all that ice quickly began to melt ­ spurring heavy flash floods in parts of Potter County. Combined with 4 to 6 inches of rain, the melting hail produced up to 2 feet of water that forced further road closures. Much of the hail was still there Thursday afternoon, Garcia says, and it could take several days for all of it to melt.
 
Meteorologist Jim LaDue sets the stage in an excellent blog post on how this happened:

Slow moving supercells are common in the high plains of North America where low-level winds oppose midlevel winds to result in slow storm motion. This was no exception on 2012 April 11 when a supercell formed on a stationary front just north of Amarillo. The supercell dropped huge amounts of marginally severe sized hail (~1”) on Rt 287 south of Dumas, TX. In fact, Rt 287 had to be shut down because drifts of hail covered the road several feet thick. "It looked like soap suds," said Pronews 7 meteorologist Steve Kersh. "The storm was moving really slow and a combination of the pea-sized hail and four to six inches of rain created those conditions."


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Krissy Scotten / National Weather Service

Covered in dust, this hail drift measured six feet high on April 12 and was still intact a day after it formed near Dumas, Texas, the National Weather Service said.