That shit cray.
I know this looks like a firefighter standing in a crack in some rocks, but no, my friend: those are four-foot hail drifts in Amarillo, Texas. The reason they look so dirty is that this is basically the only precipitation the drought-stricken state has been getting lately — Texas was covered in mostly dust, so now it’s covered in mostly dusty ice. Which is not really an improvement in terms of things like agriculture, but it sure looks impressive.
This photo was posted on the Facebook wall of the National Weather Service’s Amarillo branch, and the NWS sent an employee out the day after the April 11 storm to check on the massive drifts. They’d gotten a little less massive and a little more muddy, but they were still hanging on:
And here’s a closeup view of the hailstones. They’re not the monsters that have apparently been showing up in other storms, but damn, there are a lot of them.
