Just for the Hail of It

     The United States has the greatest range of weather events in the world. The range includes the more severe flash floods, tornadoes, hurricanes and blizzards as well as the not so severe range. Hail is not one of the more damaging types of weather (though it can and does cause damage) but it is a weather event sure to be talked about!

 
   Hail is made up of spherical balls of ice which fall from some spring and summer thunderstorms. It forms in thunderstorms which have strong updrafts of air. Sometimes water droplets in a cloud are prevented from falling as they are swept up into the cold layers of the cloud where they freeze. As the ice pellet begins to fall, it becomes covered with rain droplets and then gets swept back up into the cloud where it forms  another layer of ice. This cycle continues until the air can no longer support the weight of the piece of ice and it falls as hail.  The stronger the updraft winds, the more return trips the hailstones will take and therefore the larger they will become.

     If you were to take a piece of hail and cut it in half, you would be able to see the layers of ice. It looks a good deal like an onion sliced in half! If you have examined hail, you might also have noticed that sometimes the ice layers are quite clear and other times they are milky. The clarity of the ice is determined by the temperature of the water and how quickly it freezes.

     Milky-looking ice is formed when water containing dissolved air bubbles freezes. If the air bubbles escape as the water freezes, clear ice is formed. As each new layer is formed, the cloudiness or clarity of the layer depends on how much dissolved air remains in the ice.

      Hailstones can grow to be quite large, often reaching golf ball size. The largest hailstone recorded fell in Coffeyville, Kansas on September 3, 1979 and measured 5.6 inches in diameter (or a circumference of 17.5 inches)!

     Large hailstones can do damage such as breaking car windshields. Most of the damage done by hail is done to crops. Each year in the United States, hail does about one billion dollars damage to crops. Farmers spend about sixty million dollars on hail insurance annually!

     Large hail has been responsible for human deaths over the years. The deadliest hailstorm on record occurred April 30, 1888 in India where 246 people perished! In the Sichuqan Province of China in 1986 over one hundred people were killed in a hailstorm. Some of the individual hailstones weighed over two pounds.

     By contrast, there have been only two known hail fatalities in the US this century. One happened in Texas in the 1930's and the other occurred July 30, 1979 in Colorado where a sudden storm produced grapefruit sized hail. An infant was struck and killed  while its mother was trying to rush it to safety.

     Animals and birds have not fared so lucky where hail is concerned. On July 15, 1978 a hailstorm spewing baseball sized hail killed more than 200 sheep in Montana. Worse yet, on July 14, 1953 a hailstorm in Alberta, Canada killed over 36,000 ducks. Another storm occurred in the same area a few days later and killed another 30,000 ducks!

     Hail is even believed to have impacted world history. During the summer of 1788, severe hailstorms wiped out much of the crops in the region around Paris. This produced a severe shortage of food for people already in a foul mood. The end result was the French Revolution!