The Hunt for Big Hail 82
Hailstones of record size are falling left and right, and hailstorm damage is growing. But there is surprisingly little research to explain why. From a report: On Aug. 1, a team of scientists from Western University in London, Ontario, collected a giant hailstone while chasing a storm in Alberta, about 75 miles north of Calgary. The hailstone measured five inches across and weighed a little more than half a pound -- half the size and one-quarter the heft of Mr. Scott's. So it was not a world record, but a Canadian one. The Canadian hailstone added to the list of regional records set in the past couple of years, including Alabama's in 2018 (5.38 inches long, 0.612 pounds), Colorado's in 2019 (4.83 inches, 0.53 pounds) and Africa's in 2020 (around seven inches long, weight unknown). Australia set a national record in 2020, then set it again in 2021. Texas' record was set in 2021. In 2018, a storm in Argentina produced stones so big that a new class of hail was introduced: gargantuan. Larger than a honeydew melon.
But the record-setting has come with increased hail damage. Although the frequency of reported "hail events" in the United States is at its lowest in a decade, according to a recent report by Verisk, a risk assessment firm, insurance claims on cars, houses and crops damaged by hail reached $16.5 billion in 2021 -- the highest ever. Hail can strip plants to the stem and effectively total small cars. Ten years after the record-setting storm in Vivian, the tin roofs of some buildings are still dented. On Wednesday, a hailstorm killed a toddler in the Catalonia region of Spain. "It's one of the few weather hazards that we don't necessarily build for," said Ian Giammanco, a meteorologist at the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety. "And it's getting bigger and worse." Although the changing climate probably plays a role in these trends, weather experts say, a more complete explanation might have something to do with the self-stoking interplay of human behavior and scientific discovery. As neighborhoods sprawl into areas that experience heavy hail and greater hail damage, researchers have sought out large hailstones and documented their dimensions, stirring public interest and inviting further study.
Julian Brimelow, the director of the Northern Hail Project, a new collaboration among Canadian organizations to study hail, whose team found the record hailstone in August, said, "It's a pretty exciting time to be doing hail research." The fixation with big hail goes back to at least the 1960s, when Soviet scientists claimed that they could significantly reduce the size of a storm's hailstones by dispersing chemicals into the atmosphere. The method, called cloud seeding, promised to save millions of dollars in crop damage a year. In the 1970s, the United States funded the National Hail Research Experiment to replicate the results of the Soviet experiments, this time by cloud seeding in hailstorms above Northern Colorado. Scientists then collected the largest hailstones they could find to see if it worked. It did not. And a decade of research demonstrated that the Soviet effort probably hadn't worked either. Both countries eventually gave up on the idea, and hailstone research stalled, although cloud seeding to increase rain and snowfall continued -- and continues to this day -- around the world.
But the record-setting has come with increased hail damage. Although the frequency of reported "hail events" in the United States is at its lowest in a decade, according to a recent report by Verisk, a risk assessment firm, insurance claims on cars, houses and crops damaged by hail reached $16.5 billion in 2021 -- the highest ever. Hail can strip plants to the stem and effectively total small cars. Ten years after the record-setting storm in Vivian, the tin roofs of some buildings are still dented. On Wednesday, a hailstorm killed a toddler in the Catalonia region of Spain. "It's one of the few weather hazards that we don't necessarily build for," said Ian Giammanco, a meteorologist at the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety. "And it's getting bigger and worse." Although the changing climate probably plays a role in these trends, weather experts say, a more complete explanation might have something to do with the self-stoking interplay of human behavior and scientific discovery. As neighborhoods sprawl into areas that experience heavy hail and greater hail damage, researchers have sought out large hailstones and documented their dimensions, stirring public interest and inviting further study.
Julian Brimelow, the director of the Northern Hail Project, a new collaboration among Canadian organizations to study hail, whose team found the record hailstone in August, said, "It's a pretty exciting time to be doing hail research." The fixation with big hail goes back to at least the 1960s, when Soviet scientists claimed that they could significantly reduce the size of a storm's hailstones by dispersing chemicals into the atmosphere. The method, called cloud seeding, promised to save millions of dollars in crop damage a year. In the 1970s, the United States funded the National Hail Research Experiment to replicate the results of the Soviet experiments, this time by cloud seeding in hailstorms above Northern Colorado. Scientists then collected the largest hailstones they could find to see if it worked. It did not. And a decade of research demonstrated that the Soviet effort probably hadn't worked either. Both countries eventually gave up on the idea, and hailstone research stalled, although cloud seeding to increase rain and snowfall continued -- and continues to this day -- around the world.
Yet more /. "editor" incompetency. (Score:2)
Mr. Scott's what? Who's Mr. Scott?
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I think it's obvious...
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From TFA:
Most reports of record hail are made by civilians, but the accuracy is often lacking. The first thing most people do when they find a big hailstone? Take a picture. Second? Show it to their family or friends. Third? Put it in the freezer — where sublimation, the phase change from solid ice to water vapor, can shrink the hailstone over time.
Mr. Scott, in Vivian, kept his world record in the freezer for weeks before someone from the National Weather Service was able to officially measure and weigh it. During that time, it shrank by about three inches, he said. “I just didn’t realize what I had,” he said. “There’s a lot more hailstones that fell, and there were bigger ones than the one I picked up.”
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Hailstones of record size are falling left and right,
Yup, I hear they're knocking out rodents of unusual size when they hit them.
Okay, which rodents? TV rodents? (Score:2)
I'm pretty sure you're going for funny, but I'm missing the joke. The "unusual size" makes me think it might be cartoon rodents.
But my initial reaction to the story is to wonder how much of this might be due to better reporting. I think some of what seems to be new these days is just a result of easier reporting of various things, with some of those things then being recognized as new records. Also have to be careful to consider the accuracy of the older measurements...
Not exactly a solution approach, but m
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Inconceivable!
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You keep using that joke. I do not think it means what you think it means.
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NAK
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Hailstones of record size are falling left and right,
Yup, I hear they're knocking out rodents of unusual size when they hit them.
Let's not forget the kid being killed [bbc.com] by giant hailstones.
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"...half the size and one-quarter the heft of Mr. Scott's." Mr. Scott's what? Who's Mr. Scott?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] ... DUUUHHHH!!!
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You can probably find out by reading the article being cited. Believe it or not it would have impractical for the Slashdot editor in question to quote the entire article.
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To change cited quotes? I don't think so.
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Your editorial demands are absurd. A quote that size doesnt need every little thing not detailed in its body added in to it. If you really care that much about who this Mr Scott is you can read the fucking article as knowing who he is is not necessary for understanding the gist of what the article is about.
Once again, you might as well demand Slashdot quotes the entire article in the summary. It's a summary. It inherently does not contain all of the info the base article does.
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Somewhere your high school English teacher just shed a tiny tear or flipped over in her grave.
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Yes, she understood what a summary is.
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"It's a summary. It inherently does not contain all of the info the base article does."
It is however still supposed to be internally consistent and self contained, summarizing the content of another work in way that makes perfect sense even if you haven't read the other work.
If your defense of your summary is that "it would make sense if you read the fucking article", then you've just agreed that its a poorly written summary.
If Mr Scott is uncessary, then he shouldn't be mentioned, and if he's mentioned he
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The summary made perfect sense, hail in hail storms is getting bigger. What didn't make sense was a person's name which was essentially irrelevant to understanding the broad context being summarized.
If there's an editorial issue with that post is that the summary is too long. It doesn't need extra information added to it that in no way shape or form belongs in a summary.
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" What didn't make sense..."
Then we agree it didn't make sense. Just because we both understood the 'broad context' doesn't mean it was a good summary.
Scott shouldn't have been mentioned at all, and the first paragraph about records really wasn't really relevant either. In general the 3 paragraphs quoted don't really "summarize" the article at all, at best they "introduce" it.
So its quite poor as a "summary", and not very good as an "introduction" either. Really it was pretty much entirely a quote, even the
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Then we agree it didn't make sense. Just because we both understood the 'broad context' doesn't mean it was a good summary.
The purpose of a summary is to understand the "broad context", it is not to find out the names of every single person relevant to what is being summarized. If a name is mentioned with no context in a quote that is part of a summary a reasonable person should be assuming that that person is not important to understanding what is being summarized and that if they really want to know more about this irrelevant name they can read the article. An unreasonable person insists that this unimportant person be contex
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Just because you can produce some word-salad that manages to convey the "broad context" of a an article doesn't mean its a well written summary.
Also, no, "The purpose of a summary", is to produce a summation - like in math, the "sum" of the elements. It should contain the most salient and important nuggets of information, the main argument, point, and conclusion. A summary doesn't need to give you the the 'broad context', not an 'introduction'.
No, this was not a good 'summary' at all.
We don't need to discus
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You keep attempting to broaden this conversation beyond anything I was ever talking about. My issue has been from the get go that the identity of that individual was unecessary in a summary and that adding this info would have made the summary even worse. Full stop.
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Or using square brackets for editor comments, such as "half the size and one-quarter the heft of Mr. Scott's [the previous record holder]".
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"...half the size and one-quarter the heft of Mr. Scott's."
Mr. Scott's what? Who's Mr. Scott?
Obviously a Star Trek reference, and a rather crude allusion to Scotty's engineering prowess.
Why I'm not surprised (Score:5, Interesting)
The more greenhouses gasses are in our atmosphere, the more the lower atmosphere warms, and the upper atmosphere cools. Stratospheric phenomena that used to be confined to the polar regions are now global. This was consistently predicted as a component of industrially-induced climate change.
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Sure! Way to go brother. Bigger hailstones are undoubtedly and 100% scientifically surely due to, drum rolls; climate change.
Nowadays, everything is due to climate change and only stupid flat-earthers and definitely racist and extremist republicans would go against something 100% scientifically proven.
This is becoming really boring...
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Why don't we hear about your idol, Greta Thunderberg anymore?
Iduno why we listened to kids in the first place. She's not a climatologist. Here's the honest truth about the economy: peak oil.
But its not the fearmongering version of peak oil that we are experiencing. The economy is experiencing the "free market solutions" that peak oil deniers predicted would come to pass.
, I forecast that things should get better,
Cool. Looking forward to seeing glaciers again in Yosemite.
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Germany was willfully oblivious. Their neighbor, Poland, got the hint after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, and started making other energy supply plans. Even if the 2022 invasion of Ukraine had not happened, Poland was going to let their gas contract with Russia (which was already down to about 30% of their supply) simply expire and buy that gas from Norway instead, starting January 1. Then they got the Baltic states to buy in, and they have a pipeline from Norway that runs east to Estonia, then southwest-i
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Fucking lemmings. Don't look up.
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LOL! Some predictions made by astrologists and other divinatory practice people also comes true eventually. LOL!
LOL! If the predictions of an astrologist comes true at a level greater than expected by statistical models, then that would be truly novel! LOL!
But that doesn't happen.
Taking care of the environment is something any sensible human should do (I do very scrupulously anyway).
That $15 bucks you make for mowing your neighbors lawn doesn't count, buddy.
Being blind and adhering to something extreme preached by pseudo climate change priest that don't have a clue is something completely different.
There are no priests here. Attempting to slander them as such is so intellectually weak.
Climates are chaotic systems, so they're difficult to model at anything but the most distant views.
Our climate models are freakishly good. They're the best models of a chaotic
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That's nice. Where the fuck are my hurricanes?
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Let's start from the beginning.
I never made any claims about hurricanes. But I'll bite. Trolls gotta eat, too.
As previously mentioned, simple thermodynamics dictates that slowing down the flux o
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Sure! Way to go brother. Bigger hailstones are undoubtedly and 100% scientifically surely due to, drum rolls; climate change.
Nowadays, everything is due to climate change and only stupid flat-earthers and definitely racist and extremist republicans would go against something 100% scientifically proven.
This is becoming really boring...
So are you putting forward an alternate theory or just crying because you don't want climate change to be a real thing?
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The article clearly says there are less hailstorms and the size of the hail hasn't increased significantly.
There are many explanations for the increases in damages since the 1970s:
- We are more and more capable of living in areas with extreme weather events. Whereas in the 60s and 70s nobody would want to live in a desert or a tornado/hurricane/flood prone areas, air-conditioning, better construction methods and overall reduction in adverse weather events make some areas more habitable.
- We are more and mor
Perfectlt reasonable explanition... (Score:3)
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Was it the Big Hail that took out the firstborn?
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Was it the Big Hail that took out the firstborn?
Nope. It was a supposed omnipotent being who decided to kill thousands of children who had done nothing other than being born as a way to punish pharoah rather than simply kill pharoah himself.
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It was early game, not enough mana for a direct strike.
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It was next on the list of Blood, Frogs, Gnats, Flies, Livestock and Boils. After that it's Locusts.
It probably hasn't dawned on so-called Christians that as soon as they started worshipping an orange buffoon a plague descended on the land.
What the hail (Score:1)
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This is corporations' attempt to be too big to hail.
Stop Big Hail! Save the children of the corn!
Raincloud = water + heat + time (Score:2)
As a miller, I learned that rain clouds need moisture and heat. The heat makes the moisture rise and thereby cool. When the moisture condenses, it takes a lot less volume and a low pressure is created which enhances the effect. But it is the heat that drives the "engine" of the cloud. That is why, in the Netherlands, the most fierce rainfall and thunderclouds appear east of the IJsselmeer (a big lake in the north center of the country): The west wind comes over the North sea taking up moisture, takes up hea
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But as with all weather events since the 1970s, besides increased number of measurements and reports, the relative sizes and frequency haven't changed considerably. You can look at the reports, all it states is that we collect more data but hail in the 1970s was just as big on average as it is today and the distribution of large vs small stones is roughly the same.
Something else to worry about (Score:5, Funny)
It's bad enough having to think about Big Oil and Big Pharma - now we have to worry about Big Hail?
This is scary (Score:5, Interesting)
We are getting up to sizes which could easily penetrate the rather thin and flimsy roof of the typical modern American home. And newer homes usually don't have a solid attic floor to stop a giant hailstone from punching through a drywall ceiling and into a bedroom. 5 inches is like a small cannonball.
Of course because of current climate change, we are likely to see more and more of these kinds of hailstones and roofs that are turned into swiss cheese.
Re: This is scary (Score:2)
Here's an example:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=lo... [youtube.com]
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A few years ago I got caught with a few kids in a small tennis shelter when we got hit by golf-ball sized hail - that was full on!
Now we have a new type: "gargantuan" - honey dew sized - that's a canon ball doing what? Terminal velocity.
You are going to need a bloody good shelter to get through that.
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Time to move into shipping containers. I bet a 5 inch hailstone will be loud as shit hitting the top of one of those.
The real question is, how do I protect my solar panels? Inflatable rafts? Sure they're supposed to survive hail, but not that hail
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The hail sounded like rifle shots as they smacked the roof above.
We watched in amazement as the roof above dented as they hit.
As to your solar panels - good luck.
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I think the cheap fix to protect the solar panels would be chain link fence. If it can stop actual baseballs, it can probably take ice baseballs. Problem is, each storm would probably take a lot of elasticity out of the fence and it would have to be replaced fairly frequently. Also you'd have to make a frame to put an air gap between the panels and the fence, and take the slight collecting loss that the shadow of the chain link provides. I suppose the chain link could be used to dissipate waste heat though,
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I don't mind if I have to deploy my protective solution proactively, so it's not a big problem if it reduces output substantially.
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Re: This is scary (Score:2)
I'm thinking that for the attic in question would be to lay down wooden planks, or even plywood (not particle board). The roof will still get destroyed but the important parts of the home (the occupants) would be protected. Solar panels? Yeah, I think that one could only be 'protected' with a good insurance policy. :-|
Re:This is not "scary", just expensive. (Score:5, Informative)
Maybe the bill is scary, but your life isn't in danger from hailstones.
Shut the fuck up [asu.edu]
Also, terminal velocity is a thing. At most, you're going to have a large hailstone coming down at 80-100MPH at best. About the speed of a major league baseball pitcher. Going to damage your roof, yes. Going to kill you...no.
Shut the fuck up [wikipedia.org]
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you're going to have a large hailstone coming down at 80-100MPH at best. About the speed of a major league baseball pitcher.
Get hit by enough MLB pitches and indeed you will die. There's a reason batters wear helmets.
Re: This is not "scary", just expensive. (Score:2)
Whenever I see a video on Youtube showing a storm chaser's windshield getting caved in by large hail, I always have to wonder about the homeless who might be in a nearby city getting hit with some of that hail.
"same as a baseball"
I wouldn't want to test the survivability out in the open, and I've already posted a Youtube link of a house where the hail ripped through the roof, through a ceiling, and ended up in a living room.
Re: This is not "scary", just expensive. (Score:2)
"Do you curl up in a ball and cry during a thunderstorm too?"
Ha! I'm the one who sits on the porch while the lightning is crashing down all around and everyone else has long ran inside. Of course if a 'nado is coming, I have enough sense to head to the basement.
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I wonder if places where they have industrial sized solar plants are also checked for hail storms before they do the build.
I imagine that a large solar farm getting hit by hail is not going to survive.
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We are getting up to sizes which could easily penetrate the rather thin and flimsy roof of the typical modern American home. And newer homes usually don't have a solid attic floor to stop a giant hailstone from punching through a drywall ceiling and into a bedroom. 5 inches is like a small cannonball.
Of course because of current climate change, we are likely to see more and more of these kinds of hailstones and roofs that are turned into swiss cheese.
The problem is that short of installing welded steel plate as a roofing material (and building the entire structure to handle the weight), I can't think of a way to build that would keep hail of that size from destroying a house. Remember that it's also pouring rain at the same time, so just keeping it from penetrating isn't enough - you have to maintain waterproofing, or the whole house and most things in it get totaled by water damage.
There's really no cost-effective way of doing it. Maybe if we all lived
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The article states because of current climate change we are seeing less frequency in hailstorms. Any data I could find shows the same distribution in sizes for the last few decades.
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How's your newspaper subscription doing these days, anyway?
What's really sad is the average Joe has turned into an opinionated fucking freeloader.
Hailstones (Score:4, Funny)
The size of canned hams!!
Sorry I can't find the David letterman video:(
A kid died recently due to hail (Score:5, Informative)
In Spain, a few days ago, a 18 months-old girl died because of hail. A 10cm (almost 4 inches) hailstone hit her head and she died afterward in the hospital.
Link to news (only in Spanish): https://www.elmundo.es/catalun... [elmundo.es]
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Indeed. The summary even confirms your news.
to heck in a handbasket (Score:1)
Climate change is Hail.
Toddler killed ... (Score:2)
A week ago, a toddler was killed in Spain [bbc.com] by 10 cm (4 inch) hail, among other severe damage ...
Nobody noticed this? (Score:3)
"...Although the frequency of reported "hail events" in the United States is at its lowest in a decade...insurance claims on cars, houses and crops damaged by hail reached $16.5 billion in 2021..."
What that tells me is that there are more people living in more places than ever, so we have a reporting issue more than an 'actual increase in events' issue.
Hail that wouldn't have been noticed/claimed 40 years ago as it either melted ignored in a pasture, or hit a farmhouse where the farmer would have just fixed it...now it's hitting $2.2 million crypto-boi estate with $400k in solar panels.
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Maybe. Or maybe there's fewer hail events total, but the ones which occur are more serious. Or maybe there's just more stuff to be destroyed, total. Or maybe the hail is now happening in places which are less prepared. You can't tell which of the many possibilities are true from the quoted passage.
All hail...the king (Score:2)
Certainly gives new meaning to that phrase.