Tracking severe thunderstorms, hail over parts of metro Atlanta

Thursday evening showers and starts have returned to North Georgia and these are pulsing up and becoming strong and severe. We don't have a lot of storms on the map but the storms that have developed, they have become intense. In fact, in the last 20 minutes, we have reports of half dollar sized hail in Alpharetta, also that large hail in Roswell as well. And this is all within a severe thunderstorm warning which is for parts of Cherokee County, southeastern Cherokee County, that northern part of Fulton County including Alpharetta, down to Roswell and also Northeastern Cobb County. So that warning is going to go until 930 tonight. A meteorologist, Melissa Norden for Chris Holcomb with your weather impact team. And this thunderstorm is one of several that we have on the north side of the metro and these all developed after another thunderstorm kind of collapsed that was in uh Walton County earlier that also cause damage. And I want to show you the damage from Walton County, Sam. If we can take this full look at this, this is from 11 live viewer, Abby Brooks, you can see multiple trees snapped over in Monroe County. Uh in Monroe rather, in Walton County and Walton County emergency management are reporting that we have 3 to 4 structures in the county that were damaged. At one point. There were about 3000 customers without power between the E MC and Georgia Power Customs within Walton County. You can see these trees were snapped in half and many roadways were blocked by fallen trees, but that was earlier tonight, about two hours earlier. Now, we are focused on the storms on the northern side of the metro area and these thunderstorms producing some 60 mile per hour damaging winds and also hail. So I want to what I want to do right now, I know it's kind of hard to see this. Um On the map, I'm going to take some of that fuzziness out of the radar image. And what I want to show you is where the core of this storm is. I'm going to put on a mode of the radar that we call velocity and this helps us track when storms are pulsing up and pulsing down. They actually just trim that warning back a little bit, but that storm was really intense right between Alpharetta and Roswell. And it looks like it's kind of on its way collapsing down right now. So still the potential for hail. Um The emergency manager in Fulton County as well was reporting hail near the Roswell area. We had several reports from train spotters of half dollar size, so about one and a quarter inch size hail there that was in Alpharetta on kind of the western side of Alpharetta. And now that storm is centered over the western side of Alpharetta down to Roswell, right along Georgia 400. We're also seeing as we zoom out a little bit. We don't have any warnings on it, but we've got more of these areas with heavy rainfall throughout portions of Cobb County as well. We'll fix the radar again for you. So it's easier to see. Um, you can see in downtown Marietta all on the 120 loop, we have heavy rainfall and lightning also, as you travel up into northwestern Cobb County and Southwester Cherokee County and Bartow County, we've also got some areas of heavy rain and lightning there. So again, this is one severe thunderstorm warning still in effect. This is going to run until 930 this evening. This is for parts of Fulton County and also southeastern Cherokee County and as well as Northeastern Cobb County until 930. So that storm, these are pulse thunderstorms. They're not like a line of thunderstorms. We call them pulse storms because they have one updraft, one down drop. Sometimes these storms in the summer they intensify really quickly. We see the lightning counts going up on them and as they're collapsing, they'll drop strong winds. That's how we get these down burst winds in the summer time and sometimes as they're pulsing up we also get hail. So these storms that have very tall updrafts, the hail keeps getting cycled in them for longer, more times up and down the thunderstorm. And so the strongest of thunderstorms, the tallest thunderstorm uh tops, that's where we start to see the larger hail. A lot of our 11 live weather impact team members on Facebook are also commenting what they're seeing out there. Heath Harvey started off in John's Creek um about an hour ago with pea size hail and then that hail actually grew in size. Also Nicole uh Marston down in Duluth was saying there's lots of rain that was coming down there and we just got a video as well in from Lawrenceville. I'm going to try to get this up here in a few minutes for you, but a lot of lightning and heavy rain in Lawrenceville and also in Roswell, they were getting Dory Griggs was one of our 11 weather impact team members and she was also seeing some of that heavy rain, the hail, the lightning in Roswell. Um So again, just recapping, we have this severe thunderstorm warning. Uh nickel size hail according to the emergency manager in Fulton County, Shane, Spar Goski uh nickel size hail at fire station 25 that's in Roswell off of Henbury road. Also several trees down. And if you guys can hear me in the newsroom, I'm going to read out some trees down if we can send a photojournalist uh house road, there is a tree down as well on East Creek Circle. Those are both I think in the Roswell area. So reports of not just the hail but trees down in the Roswell community as well. Um I will check the Georgia Power outage map. We're just kind of tracking this live as we're on 11 live plus and 11 live on the app, the Georgia Power outage numbers. We're not seeing a lot coming in yet, but they've just started coming in from kind of northern Fulton County. Looks like in between Milton and Roswell. We have about 500 customers without power in Alpharetta, we have over 1700 customers without power. Um and it looks like those outages kind of stop as you get south of Roswell into Dunwoody. We're not seeing as many power outages there, couple near John's Creek, Peach street corners, but those are less than 100 people. And the earlier power outages that we saw the big numbers about 3000 without power in Walton County. A lot of those are uh restored but still about 200 customers without power near social circles. So that's kind of in between Southwester Walton County and also northeastern Newton County where we had that earlier severe thunderstorm. So we still have several 1000 people likely without power. And the core of these that are over the north side of Atlanta, about 17 100 customers without power in the western side of Alpharetta down through Roswell. So some people are dealing with power outages because of those down trees, the down likely a couple of down power lines as well. And then the large hail that we were seeing, I'm going to put a mode of the radar on that we can look at the hail. This is the, let's see, this is a hail size mode not seeing a lot of hail size right now. Let's see. We get our hail tracks to come up from the last hour. My service. There we go. You see this. Ok. This is, you can see where it pulsed up. So this takes us through a history timeline of the hail size within this thunderstorm. You see how the hail in Johns Creek wasn't very big. But then as that storm moved into the western part of John's Creek in Alpharetta, it really just pulled up and I'm going to query a couple of these numbers that you can see uh the hail size there between West side Parkway and kind of the south side of Alpharetta who estimated this is radar estimated, so not confirmed, but radar estimated sizes of nearly two inches in diameter. So when we talk about hail sizes, we have a whole chart and when we get to kind of nickel size hail, that's less than an inch. So it's not severe worn criteria. We up to quarter size. So that's about an inch in diameter. That's where we start to see severe, uh, warn thunderstorms, the half dollar size hail that we were getting confirmed earlier. That's about an inch and a quarter. And then we get up to ping pong ball size hail, which is about this. It's about an inch and 1.75 inches. We get up to ping pong ball size hail and that's what we were seeing near Mansel Road and uh Haines Bridge Road. This is the radar estimated. So they're trying to estimate it was closer to two inches, which would be about hen egg size. But I mean, who really knows what a hen egg looks like in diameter? Best thing to do if you have a hail report, take the hail and put it in your freezer after the hail is done. When you measure it, you want to measure it with a ruler. So don't just put the hail on the palm of your hand and say this is how large it was. Everybody's hand is a different size. So when we're talking about hail sizes, the best thing is is to put it next to something with a reference point. So if you have a ruler, that's great because we can get a really exact measurement. But you, you heard me say quarter size, nickel size, uh half dollar size. Those are the kind of put it next to a ping pong ball or a golf ball. Uh and those are the better markers for us. To know how big exactly the hail was rather than just the size of your, your, um, hand. So again, we had large hail. The severe thunderstorm warning continues until 930 this evening. It's for parts of northern Fulton County, Cobb County, as well as Cherokee County and the earlier severe thunderstorm warning in Walton County that's been expired for quite a while. So we've got that, we've also got a new thunderstorm that's kind of pulsing up if you will in Northwestern Cobb County. And that one between Emerson Ackworth and kind of the western side of Kennesaw through Mars Hill road up through Allatoona High School. And that again, it doesn't have a severe thunderstorm warning on it. But as these storms pulse up, even if they don't have a warning, we can have some of those wind gusts around 40 to 50 MPH at most. Um And so that, that is an indicator of a strong storm that's not necessarily reaching that severe criteria. Again, it looks like the hail threat is kind of coming down a lot and that's great, but we did have some earlier confirmed hail that was half dollar size. But again, the severe thunderstorm warning is kind of for Northeastern Cobb County, Northern Alpha, uh Fulton County, near Alpharetta between Roswell and Alpharetta and at Northeastern Lo section of Cherokee County, east of Woodstock. So kind of a long highway 92 there. But we're also seeing the thunderstorms that are pulsing up there in Bartow County and Cherokee County. Um, I'm in my chat room and I'm looking through, I get information from emergency managers, the National Weather service. We also have our 11 alive weather impact team community as well. Um, and I, I really appreciate everybody that sends those reports because that helps all of us track these thunderstorms better. Um, but we did get an earlier video in, I showed you a few minutes ago, I'll show it to you again. This is from the storm earlier in Walton County in Monroe. The trees snapped in half. Um So these thunderstorms, a lot of these we typically see in the summertime calming down around sunset, we lose that daytime heating and they calm down. But these kind of just started getting going around sunset because we had these little outflow boundaries from thunderstorms. So these should last another hour, maybe two hours at the most. I would hope that they'll be kind of calming down by 11 o'clock tonight and then we'll focus on more storm threats on the way for tomorrow. And I just want to briefly touch on the holiday weekend forecast while we're talking about the severe thunderstorm that's here now because notice each and every day, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, each of those days, there's an opportunity for more thunderstorms, but none of those days show you 100% chance of rain. What that means is kind of like what we're seeing right now, the coverage of the rain, the coverage of the thunderstorms is going to be pretty limited. But when we see these storms developing with it still being hot and humid outside, we can see a few of these storms that turn strong, maybe even turn severe. And tomorrow again, there's another opportunity for a couple of those stronger storms. This is the outlook from the storm prediction center for Friday afternoon and evening. So that bold Kelly green color on the map. Athens all the way up into Dahlonega Helen. If you're going to be kind of shooting the hooch up there and up through northeast Georgia, that's a level one threat of severe weather. So, just like today, not every storm is going to be severe, but we have enough heat and humidity out there that we'll see the potential for maybe a stray shower thunderstorm that turns severe like we've seen this evening. Let me show you a forecast track because today's rounds of round of storms will be quieting down. We've got another one we're dealing with tomorrow. We will start the day, mostly muggy and really mild. We're going to quickly heat up to around 90 then as we get into the afternoon, we're in the nineties and here we go, we get these hit or miss showers and storms developing, they will continue through sunset and then they'll start to calm down. So a couple of these could still be ongoing as we have high school football games beginning Saturday morning looks like a dry start. So if you're going to be out tailgating before the Georgia Clemson game, things look mostly dry. But again, in the afternoon showers and storms develop. I think most of these are going to be done by sunset, but I don't want to say that it's dry altogether. So if you're heading to the Georgia State and Georgia Tech game in the evening, it is again possible that there could be a shower or storm impacting you. Um National Weather Service just continuing this special weather statement that is for the 40 mile per hour winds in Cobb Bartow Paulding counties. Um and the severe thunderstorm warning will be expiring here at 930. Another thing I want to mention, which I don't think we mentioned at the beginning here, we tied today's record high in Atlanta. Yes. Let me get up the almanac. Uh We tied the record high of 98 degrees from 1990. We're waiting on the official climate report to come out after midnight tonight, but this was our record for the day. I mean, we were saying all week how it would be very hot Wednesday and Thursday, we hit 97 yesterday today, 98. So that would tie if that stands, which it should stand. It ties our daily record for the day of uh 98 from 1990. So that is a 34 year old record that is tied today and this rain is coming on the heels of a developing drought situation. Our drought monitor that came out today brought in again a moderate drought to parts of North Georgia in Atlanta itself. At the airport. We picked up 0.77 inches of rain this entire month. Uh I'll pull that graphic up for you. We're on, if today, the month of August ended, it would be the third driest August on record for us. So we've got a rain deficit of over three inches. I'll step to the other side of the screen so you can see a little bit better. We've got a rain deficit of over three inches here for the month of August in Atlanta. So it's been really dry, but here today, all the way through the weekend, it's these pop up thunderstorms that we'll be seeing that hopefully add a little bit more rain to that rain number. So again, just recapping, we're going to wrap up this, uh, live broadcast on 11 live plus and 11 live here shortly. This thunderstorm luckily has weakened. Um I, I wouldn't be surprised if they in fact end it early, the thunderstorm warning, but the storm really pulsed up over Alpharetta and Roswell and we saw, we have confirmed reports of half dollar size hail and I'll show you where those hail trackers happened. You see that big purple on the map. This is our estimated hail size what it was. So this was over Haines Bridge Road, old Alabama Road, uh, Mansel Road, right along Georgia 400. These were hail sizes that were, um, over, you know, this is estimated, right, are estimated close to two inch in diameter, which when you get above golf ball, ok. When you get to golf ball sized hail, which this is just above golf ball, you see dents of the cars, you can see car windshields that have cracks in them. I don't know if it actually got this large, but when we get to quarter size, we don't see a lot of damage when it gets up above half dollar size. That's big hail for around here. At least we're not in the middle of the plane. So when it gets close to two inches in diameter, we start to see a lot of damage. Um So that storm pulsed up really quickly. It is now pulsed down. But that is what our news team is working on, gathering more information about reports of hail, reports of trees down and power outages. Again, we have about 1700 customers without power in Alpharetta from Georgia Power. We also have about 500 customers kind of on the south side of Roswell who are without power right now. A couple of trees down trees down in Roswell, um on House Road, East Creek circle road. And we also have several trees that were down in Walton County as well as the storms moved in earlier. So again, we are tracking this thunderstorm. The warning is going to be expiring here shortly. I haven't gotten word if they're going to. Oh, yep. Good. So, I was just saying, I wouldn't be a surprise if they expire quickly and it just came out, just came out at 923. They're going to expire. The warning at 930 the storm has pulsed down. It's really weakening, but we still have a couple of heavy rain producers and thunderstorms in the western part of we'll go back to the normal radar so we can see that. So that's where the hail was earlier. That warning is going to be expiring and we still have some heavy rain throughout Eastern Bartow County, western Cherokee County, northwestern Cobb County and also right over the 120 loop there in Marietta, we're still tracking some locally heavy rainfall. Hopefully, we will not see any more of these turn severe. Uh, but we are on it. We have a news crew heading to Alpharetta where there were the reports of trees down and large hail. We'll bring you all of that live coming up on the news at 11 o'clock on 11 live and W AC L for now, meteorologist Melissa, nor with the 11 Alive weather impact team tracking these thunderstorms, the heat, all of that for the weekend. If you want to know more about our impact forecast for the weekend, here's how you can do. So you see that QR code on your screen, scan the code, download the 11 live app and also join our Weather Impact Facebook group. That is our community of weather enthusiasts from across North Georgia. You can send your storm reports in that way, ask questions about the weather. That way we'd love to see you there.