It was almost thirty degrees Celsius (85 degrees Fahrenheit) earlier in the day. But we are having a thunderstorm. Sky went dark, rain came pouring down. Then hailstones - many thousands of them, the biggest ones between a marble and a golf ball. I get that these higher celestial spheres can be cold. But it still seems slightly surreal.
What is the biggest hailstone you’ve seen?
Do you get them at unlikely times of the year?
Any good stories?
I’ve read a few historical accounts of early explorers on the prairies and high plains out West, this was a really bad deal, because there are no trees or anywhere to escape from the ice. Hiding under their horse was one method. Modern day living, we just think “Glad I have a garage for my car”.
When I lived in/near St. Louis we had hail rather regularly. The largest I ever saw in person was about the size of a jumbo chicken egg. YouTube of course is loaded with vids of monster hail events.
The temperatures at the top of a mature midwestern thunderstorm can be -50C or occasionally -60C. So hail can get super-cooled well below 0C/32F and not warm up all that much on the final drop through the relatively warmer air below on the way to the summer temps at ground level.
Hail is real hard on jet airplanes. The only thing worse than hail falling on you is flying though a hail shaft at 400+mph. See aircraft hail damage - Google Image Search
Fun fact: All thunderstorms are actually hailstorms. It’s just that, in most of them, the hail melts before it can reach the ground.
I’ve never seen a hailstorm that wasn’t mostly made of pea-sized hail or smaller. There would be the occasional fatter pea, but that’s it. And it was usually over fast, shifting back to rain.
Let’s see, I would describe that as nearly common in a Colorado Springs summer.
Admittedly, weather has been warmer and weirder in recent years, but hailstorms in high summer happen at least 5-6 times a year I’d say. Normally while the pre-storm weather is in the mid to high 80s and 90s.
We had one just an hour or so ago, and one on the Fourth of July for that matter. Todays was bigger than average, say around the size of a largeish kidney bean, and Fourth was larger than that pushing quail egg sized, but it’s normally pretty brief (10-30 minutes) and melts within the hour as temps rebound. But most of the time I agree, pea sized in general.
The largest hailstone I’ve ever seen was golf ball / ping-pong ball in size, but were thankfully semi-mushy.
Same thing right now in Cleveland. We went from an 85 degree day to hailstorm and about 20 foot visibility.
Hail is much more common in summer than winter, although I haven’t found a really good, clear explanation why. But this page has some information.
The worst hailstones I have ever seen were the size of baseballs. My family and I had spent the year in Zurich and in June we got SwissRail passes that allowed us free travel anywhere in the country for one month. So we would take day trips to various places. One day we went to Lugano and toured the city. We were actually headed back to the train station when the sky clouded over and it began to rain. We were actually across the street from the train station and quickly ran across to it, getting wet. Then we ended up in the underground passge between the tracks and waiting for our train to come, when it started hailing. The hailstones, some as big as baseballs, came bouncing down the steps and into that tunnel. It stopped right before our train arrived.
Worst I’ve seen is the size of small marbles, so nothing is particularly big.
Back in the late 70s, we got a hailstorm in December. Very unusual, but for some reason there was a thunderstorm (also unusual for the season) and got some hail from it.
Over the course of ten minutes, I could see well over five thousand pieces of hail bigger than a pea just on my balcony and garage alone. Summer hail is not that unusual here, but the duration, amount and size of the average chunk were impressive.
A couple winters ago we had a thunderstorm during a snowstorm. I heard the thunder and went out on the porch to watch the lightning and it started hailing. At first I thought it was sleet but it was slightly-larger-than-pea-sized balls. Very strange weather.
It’s because hail is formed in thunderstorms, which have updrafts in them (air being pulled upwards by the storm), and which are so tall that the upper potions of their cumulonimbus clouds reach the region of the atmosphere where it’s below freezing.
Raindrops fall from the storm, get caught in the updraft, and blown back upwards, where they freeze, and become little hailstones. This can happen repeatedly, and as the hailstone collides with other water droplets, those droplets freeze onto the hailstone, making it progressively bigger. Eventually, the hailstones get too heavy to be blown back upwards, and they finally fall to the ground.
A thunderstorm that produces hail, particularly large hail, is a very powerful severe storm. In most of the continental U.S., severe thunderstorms are much more common in the spring and summer than in the winter. Snow-producing storms don’t have that same kind of updraft dynamic, because the updrafts are fueled by warm temperatures at ground level, which don’t exist when it’s cold enough for a storm to drop snow, instead of rain or hail.
Sleet, on the other hand, is precipitation that falls from the cloud as water, and then encounters a layer of sub-freezing air while it falls, which makes it freeze.
I took a weather spotter training class from our local National Weather Service office this past spring; they taught us how to identify various forms of severe weather (as opposed to clouds that may look scary, but actually are), and how to report what we see to the local NWS office.
There was an entire section in the class on how to report hail size, and they repeatedly stressed, “we receive a lot of reports of ‘marble sized hail,’ and those are meaningless, because there are all sorts of different sizes of marbles – so please don’t report that hail is marble-sized!” The scale that they gave us in a handout:
Poor bastards never got to play with marbles? Everybody kniws what marble size means.
Biggest I’ve seen is probably somewhere between a softball and the size of my head. Biggest I’ve ever been hit by was between a golf ball and a baseball. I was hit in the legs while carrying a wrestling mat over some elderly folks who were evacuating into our community recreation center, which was the designated emergency storm shelter.
Yeah, northern Plains states’ hailstorms do NOT fuck around.
One of our cars after a hailstorm in '21 (Texas).
What we do now when hail is predicted.
That hailstorm destroyed our deck, roof, siding, air conditioners, car, fence, and contributed to the loss of 4 good sized trees (by stripping the leaves). Also damaged a shed, railings, gutters, another car, an automatic gate, window screens, washed out a retaining wall and even chipped out pieces of brick on one side of the house. It took less than 10 minutes.
We take the threat of hail very seriously now.
I live way, way high up in the Colorado mountains (11,200 ft). We see hail but I’ve never seen anything bigger than maybe 1/2". Doesn’t damage anything anyway.
Mostly we get graupel. Which is a soft hail like ball about pea sized. It’s kind of strange stuff.
Up here we get hail and graupel in the short summer, and snow any month of the year.
It’s interesting how hailstones are measured comparatively with sporting equipment. OTOH tumors are measured by the size of fruit and vegetables. Yet fruit and vegetables don’t have standard sizes, so a removed tumor called the size of a melon could be 6" in diameter or smaller, up to a vary large watermelon.
I lived in Fort Worth when a massive hail storm hit a festival there. We lived a few miles away, and it sounded during the storm like someone was taking nonstop batting practice against the roof of our house… quite a lot of softball-sized hail, I kept one of the biggest hail stones in the freezer, but it shrunk over time.
Besides the fact that it wrecked our roof, what most impressed me about the violence to our property was that I had a Jetta at the time, which had a very square, boxy front end, and it managed to dent inward the front corner next to the hood.