Hail is a form of precipitation that is formed under certain conditions. Hail can cause serious danger to people and property. Hail is rain packed into round or irregularly shaped pieces of ice called hailstones. Hailstones can be as small as a pea or as big as a grapefruit, sometimes even bigger than that. Most hailstones are about one inch in diameter. The bigger hailstones usually have bumps on them where they have grown more. The most layers ever found on a hailstone was twenty-five. The only place that hail falls from is the upper part of Cumulonimbus clouds.
Hailstones fall only when the ground temperature is below freezing (World Book Encyclopedia, 8). Many people confuse sleet with hail. They say sleet looks like small hailstones, but sleet is really frozen raindrops. Unlike hail, sleet forms near the ground in cold weather. The biggest hailstone ever found was discovered in Coffeyville, a small town in southeast Kansas. This hailstone weighed 1. 671 pounds and was 17. 5 inches in circumference. The largest stone previously on record was almost the same size. It was found in Potter, Nebraska on July 6, 1928. The hailstone had a circumference of 17 inches and weighed 1. 51 pounds (Dennis 54).
Hail can be extremely dangerous. It can break windows, damage roofs, dent cars, injure and even kill people! Crops are greatly affected. Hail causes around two hundred million dollars in damage a year. Thats a lot of money. When the wind is blowing hailstones are at their worst. The most common places to see hail is in Texas, through the Great Plains and up into Alberta, Canada. Areas in the east of the high plains tend to have most of their hail in the spring. Southeastern Wyoming, western Nebraska, and eastern Colorado also have massive amounts of hail falling mostly during the summer (Merit Students Encyclopedia, 351-352).
The times in which hail occurs are different in each region. In states bordering the Mississippi River and eastward, hailstorms usually happen between two in the afternoon and seven at night. Those times also apply for tornadoes and severe thunderstorms. On the high plains in the mountains hail falls mostly between noon and three in the afternoon. Then the hail moves east into the Mississippi River area. Warm, tropical locations have a small chance of getting hail. Most likely it would melt before reaching the ground (Ludlum 148). Most hailstorms last for about a half an hour. They usually only affect areas a few miles across.
That means one end of town may have hail when the other is calm. Severe hailstorms last for hours, travel many tens of miles, and produce hail areas many miles wide. Hailstones form and occur at the beginning of thunderstorms. The clouds are the exact place where they are formed as frozen raindrops or snow pellets called hail embryos. The embryos are then carried by the air currents to the spot where the hail grows. When the embryos come in contact with supercooled water droplets the hailstones are formed. Super cooled water droplets are liquid droplets that never freeze at any temperature.
When the embryos move through the droplets, they touch its surface and instantly freeze. The embryo grows into a hailstone as the freezing water builds up on its surface (Merit Students Encyclopedia, 352). There have been some very famous hailstorms that go far back in history. On June 16, 1882, in Dubuque, Iowa frogs fell from the sky during a hailstorm. The hailstones in Dubuque were up to five inches across, and small frogs were found in some of them. This odd occurrence was caused by very strong updrafts that picked up the tiny frogs and carried them into the storm clouds.
The frogs became packed inside layer upon layer of ice (Dennis 53-57). The first time a hail death was reported in the National Weather Services records was May 13, 1939. The death occurred in Lubbock, Texas to a 39-year-old farmer. The person died of injuries after being caught outside during a bad hailstorm. There have also been other hail related deaths. A death was reported in Amwell, New Jersey on June 10, 1742. On July 30, 1979, a baby was killed in its mothers arms in Fort Collins, Colorado. On July 1, 1784, the South Carolina Gazette reported that on May 8 a hailstorm with thunder and lightning fell along the banks of the Wateree.
The hailstones were pieces of ice about nine inches in circumference. The hail killed several people and many sheep, geese, and animals from the woods too. The storm was no wider than two miles but in that space it stripped trees of their leaves and even their bark. Every blade of grass in the area was beat to the ground. What people thought was most astonishing were that forty-six days later there was still unmelted hailstones in many wagons on in the Wateree. In 1930, sixteen German glider pilots were flying in a contest to see who could reach the highest altitude.
They flew into storm clouds that were building over the mountains. Extremely strong winds carried them upward before they realized they were in danger. Fourteen of the pilots were able to get their planes out of the updraft and out of the thundercloud. Two of them ended up becoming trapped. They were swirled up to thirty or forty thousand feet. The fierce currents broke up the gliders and the pilots had to bail out. One of them parachuted to earth safely, the other pilot was not so lucky. He was carried up and dropped inside the cloud. Layers of ice froze on him.
He fell seven miles to his death, making him a human hailstone (Branley 3-4)! A severe storm in Selden, Kansas on June 3, 1959 left $500,000 in damages. It covered an area of nine by six miles with hailstones eighteen inches deep. This horrible storm had hail falling for eighty-five minutes (Ludlum 147). Hail is so dangerous to crops that scientists are taking action. There have been two projects directed toward the problem. One project, overseeding, involves creating so much freezing nuclei in the hailstorm clouds that they convert all the available water droplets into ice crystals, thus locking up any potential hailstorms.
However, it has proved impractical because of the huge quantities of seeding agent needed to treat the clouds (Science and Invention Encyclopedia, 3118). The other method of hail control uses seeding agents to try to reduce the size of hailstones. The natural seeding process that goes on in a cloud can produce very large hailstones from the supercooled water droplets. Artificial seeding with enough silver iodide might produce a hundred times as many hailstones that are much smaller than the natural ones.
It is to be hoped that these small hailstones would melt to form raindrops as they fall through the layer of warm air beneath the supercooled clouds. Any that did not melt would be too small to do much damage. There is a danger that seeding might produce many large hailstones instead of a huge number of tiny ones if the seeding material is not introduced in the right part of the cloud (Science and Invention Encyclopedia, 3118-3119). Hail areas in larger storms are shaped as rectangles and called hailstreaks. An average hailstreak is about half a mile wide and five miles long.
Hail swaths are large paths covering areas of about two hundred miles and are made up of many individual hailstreaks. These are like the path of a skipping tornado (Ludlum 149). Throughout history there have been reports of freak hailstorms that produce atrocious stones. Supposedly, in 1888, a storm in northern India had baseball size hail that killed two hundred fifty people and a large number of livestock. Most recently, in 1986, a storm in Bangladesh produced outstanding stones that killed ninety-two people (Burroughs 226-227).
