Hailstorm blankets western areas under 3 feet of ice
The photographs that emerged from western Mexico on Sunday looked more like scenes from a post-apocalyptic movie than an image of the last day of June: hills of white hailstones piled up on the streets, swallowing cars and blanketing the city in a jarring layer of ice.
The hail, which accumulated up to 3 feet high in some parts of Jalisco state on Mexico’s Pacific Coast, baffled authorities who tried to find a way to clean up the icy mess.
Enrique Alfaro, governor of Jalisco, wrote on Twitter that he had never seen anything like it.
“I witnessed scenes that I had never seen before: hail more than a meter high,” he tweeted, “and then we ask ourselves if climate change exists.”
He shared photos of excavators and plows working to clear the frosty debris from the roadway. But local authorities could not do it alone. The Mexican army also assisted in the cities of Tlaquepaque and Guadalajara, two of the hardest-hit areas, according to Alfaro.
Despite the dramatic nature of the extreme weather event, no injuries were reported. But some homes were damaged, Alfaro said.
Chris Westbrook, a meteorologist at the University of Reading in Britain, said the hail was a result of warm, moist air rising into the atmosphere and rapidly cooling to form heavy balls of ice before plunging back to earth. And mountainous regions like Guadalajara are ripe for this phenomenon.
“Fundamentally, hailstorms are not unusual in this part of the world,” he said in an email. “What is unusual is that the conditions were just right to get an awful lot in one go.”