Hail

Categories: Precipitation

Hail is a type of graupel (a form of precipitation) composed of spears or irregular lumps of ice. It occurs when supercooled water droplets (remaining in a liquid state despite being below the freezing point, 0 °C/32 °F) in a storm cloud aggregates around some solid object, such as a dust particle or an already-forming hailstone. The water then freezes around the object. Depending on the wind patterns within the cloud, the hailstone may continue to circulate for some time, increasing in size. Eventually, the hailstone falls to the ground, when the updraft is no longer strong enough to support its weight.

Hail often forms in strong thunderstorms, often along a cold front, where the layer of air on top is much colder than that on the bottom. The smaller hailstones can bounce up and down between the warm and cold layers due to updrafts and gravity. The longer the stones bounce around, the larger they grow. For the same reason, larger hail can occur in warmer regions in the world due to stronger updrafts. These strong, severe, or even supercell thunderstorms can also occur in summer, even without a cold front.

Hail can do serious damage, notably to automobiles, skylights, and glass-roofed structures. Rarely, massive hailstones have been known to cause concussions or fatal head trauma.

Hailstones, while most commonly only a few millimetres in diameter, can sometimes grow to several centimetres or occasionally even bigger. Pea or golfball-size hailstones are not uncommon in severe storms. The image to the right shows an aggregate hailstone with smaller stones visible. The ruler shows the size of this hailstone as approximately 6 cm, almost the size of a tennis ball.

Costly or Deadly Hailstorms

July 11 1990, Denver, Colorado, USA, $625 million, softball-sized hail destroyed roofs and cars
May 5 1995, Dallas and Fort Worth, Texas, USA, $2 billion
April 12 1999, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, $190 Million. 15 thousand homes lost power and several people were injured.
July 19 2002, Henan Province, China, 25 dead and hundreds injured
da:Hagl de:Hagel es:Granizo eo:Hajlo fr:Grêle it:Grandine he:ברד nl:Hagel ja:霰 pl:Grad sv:Hagel th:ลูกเห็บ