Hi Aussie Girl, sorry for the late reply. I have had a bit of trouble with the NBN today.

That was a nice summary of the storm on Thursday afternoon that you put together.

The clouds are called Cumulonimbus. They tower upwards with the updrafts and can reach heights of above 50,000 feet. When the updrafts are strong and the atmosphere is cold enough, hail will form. The hail will fall and rise within the cloud and grow in size. With turbulent severe supercells, the hail can be tumbled so violently up and down and sideways and collect more ice with each tumble etc, that it will come out with different shapes and sizes and sometimes with spikes protruding from them. Usually these severe cells will produce larger hail from 2cm to what we call gorilla hail which is tennis ball size and bigger. Some of the biggest recorded have been over 1kg and can fall at speeds of 160km/h.




On the other hand with slow moving and smoother/ weaker updrafts hail will quickly fall. So they can produce pea size hail and if moving slowly, they can form hail drifts were hail can be a few centre meters thick and deeper..





Fortunately for the area you were in the updrafts were a little on the weaker side but the horizontal winds were quite strong hence the hail falling ahead of the storm. We were in a similar situation near Petrie. There was no signs of rain on the radar, but above the house we had mammatus clouds and light rain falling along with thunder. The radar may not be picking up the moisture correctly as this has happened a couple of times lately.



I took a screenshot of the Sounding but I unfortunately cut the wind barbs off when I cropped the photo. But as you can see by the red lines on the left of the sounding, the air was minus 50°C. Unfortunately I can’t show the wind speeds at the different heights. But the mid levels were quite strong on Thursday.