In August, just days before his 68th birthday, Leslie Scott, a cattle rancher in Vivian, SD, went to the post office to receive some bad news. The clerk told him that his world record had been broken. So the hailstones Scott collected in his 2010, which was eight inches in diameter and weighed nearly two pounds, are no longer the largest ever recorded. Some people in Canada have found bigger ones, the clerk said.
“I was sad all weekend,” Scott said days after hearing the news. He ‘told everyone that his record was broken’
Fortunately for Scott, this was incorrect. On August 1, a team of scientists from Western University in London, Ontario, gathered a huge hailstone while chasing a storm in Alberta, about 110 kilometers north of Calgary. The hail was five inches in diameter and weighed just over half a pound, half the size of Mr. Scott’s and weighing a quarter of his. So it wasn’t a world record, it was a Canadian record.
Canadian hail adds to list of regional records set in past years, including Alabama hail 2018 (5.38 inches long, 0.612 lbs), Colorado 2019 (4.83 inches, 0.53 pounds) and African 2020 (about 7 inches long, weight unknown).Australia set a national record in 2020 and then set again Texas record set in 2021 2021A new class of hail was introduced in 2018 because a storm in Argentina produced so large stones. HugeLarger than honeydew melon.
But it was the increase in hail damage that set the record. The frequency of reported ‘hail events’ in the US is at its lowest in his decade, According to a recent report by Verisk, a risk assessment firm, claims for hail-damaged cars, homes and crops will hit a record high of $16.5 billion in 2021. Hail strips plants down to their stems, effectively perfecting small cars. Ten years after Vivian’s record-breaking storms, the tin roofs of some buildings are still dented.Hail storms Wednesday killed a toddler Located in the Catalonia region of Spain.
“This is one of the few weather hazards that we don’t necessarily anticipate,” said Ian Giammanco, a meteorologist at the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety. “And it’s getting worse and worse.”
Weather experts say climate change may be influencing these trends, but a fuller explanation involves the spontaneous interplay of human behavior and scientific discoveries. There is a possibility. As neighborhoods stretch into areas subject to large hail and hail damage, researchers are seeking out large hailstones and recording their dimensions to arouse public interest and call for further research.
Julian Brimellow, director of the Northern Hale Project, a new collaboration between Canadian organizations to study hail, said his team found record-breaking hail in August. It’s a very exciting time to do research on.”
Ice from the sky…
The stereotype of hail goes back to at least the 1960s, when Soviet scientists claimed that dispersing chemicals into the atmosphere could greatly reduce the size of storm hail. This method, called cloud seeding, promises to save millions of dollars in crop damage annually.
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In the 1970s, the United States funded the National Hail Research Experiment, Replicate the results of Soviet experiments, this time due to the dissemination of hail storm clouds in northern Colorado. Scientists collected the largest hailstones they could find to see if it worked.
it didn’t.When A decade of research showed Soviet efforts probably also failed.Both countries eventually gave up on the idea, and hail research stagnated, but cloud seeding was done to increase rain and snowfall. continuation — and continues to this day, all over the world.
During that lull, hail fell in 1986. reportedly A weight of 1.02 kilograms, the heaviest ever recorded, was collected during a storm that killed 92 people in Gopalganj, Bangladesh. All records of the hail – except eyewitness accounts and its weight – were lost. Gopalganjite has become something of an allegory among hail researchers, with a moral attached. The big hail was there, but documentation was essential.
This prompted Kiel Ortega, a meteorologist who began studying hail in 2004, to start calling. He used his Google Earth to locate businesses in the path of the storm and called for updates on the ground. “I like to chase storms, but at some point there won’t be enough money or people to keep going out,” he said.
Weather models indicated where hail was likely to occur and the average size of hail, but the predictions were often wrong. I compiled a report every time there was a severe hailstorm in the United States. How big was the “hail belt”, the region of the storm that brought hail? How big was the largest hail?
Most of the recorded hail reports are made by civilians, but they are often inaccurate. What’s the first thing most people do when they see a big hailstorm? Take a picture. Number two? Show it to your family and friends. Third? When placed in a freezer, hail can shrink over time due to sublimation, the phase change from solid ice to water vapor.
Vivian’s Scott kept the world record in a freezer for several weeks before it was officially measured and weighed by someone at the National Weather Service. During that time, he shrank about three inches. “I didn’t realize what I had,” he said. “There was a lot of hail. There was bigger hail than what I picked up.”
…landing in your car
All hailstones carry a mysterious story in their shape and layers. To decipher the story, scientists use mathematical models to predict where the hail will land and what it will look like. Then they collect and analyze real hailstones and refine their models to piece together stone paths from the storm to the ground.
But some of the most basic characteristics of large hail remain shrouded in mystery. Investigative procedures are inconsistent and underfunded. How fast do these hailstones fall? What determines their shape? How big can they get?
“The hail data is terrible,” said Dr. Brimelow. “He’s probably one of the worst datasets on the planet.”
Almost all hail occurs in supercells, or storms, with slowly rotating updrafts. Matt Kumzian, a meteorologist at Pennsylvania State University who studies the internal dynamics of storms, said tiny pieces of ice called embryos are pushed into the updraft like “particle fountains.” The embryo breaks into a droplet and continues to grow until it becomes too heavy to float, then falls to the ground.
Over the past few years, Dr. Giammanco and his colleagues have traveled across North America to perform 3D scans of large hailstones. Later in the lab, using “probably the most sophisticated ice machine on the planet,” the team recreated hail and calculated the rate of fall and the damage it could cause.
Ortega and his colleagues have used high-speed photography to capture large hailstones in motion. This requires sprinting in front of the supercell and setting up a camera system to better understand the speed at which the ice hits the ground and the shape of the ice just before it hits.
Each detail is a clue. A layer of cloudy hail indicates that the water instantly froze on top of the embryo, trapping air bubbles inside. Clear ice means the water had time to expand around the embryo before freezing. The spherical hail is believed to have rolled within the supercell. The spiky shoots like a comet through the storm.
The end of the hail story is often the one that gets the public eye. If ice breaks the windshield, do you really care what path it took through the supercell? Tracing the , he said, will help scientists better predict when and where the next big hailstorm will occur.
records to track
Record-breaking hail in Canada was collected when the Northern Hail Project intercepted a supercell passing through central Alberta. Researchers used radar forecasts to predict the storm’s path and stopped on a stretch of road about 20 minutes after the hail passed. The ground was strewn with baseball-sized hail, but the researchers put the largest of them in a bag and froze it.
The biggest hail “is really of academic interest,” says Dr. Brimelow. Because they are “low enough in concentration to not be as dangerous as hail the size of a golf ball.” However, according to Dr. Kumjian, looking for “absolute worst-case scenarios” can improve predictive models and explain supercell dynamics. Studying single hail over time can have a tremendous impact on our understanding of storms. I was.
Dr. Kumjian and Dr. Brimelow are creating the largest recorded hail database in the world. The two believe they have determined the largest possible size of hail: just over three pounds and about a foot in diameter. will publish the results of the survey.
Francis Lavigne Therior, who coordinates storm tracking and field work for the Northern Hail Project, said the presence of large hail in central Alberta is likely to occur “much more frequently” than previously thought. Dr Brimelow said that hail-forming conditions in the region were generally less “juicy” than in other parts of the country, so the record was “very interesting.” worth it,” he said.
In other words, more records are found.
In the end, when he was informed that his world record had not been broken, and knew exactly what had happened – crossed wires, multiple records, grams and pounds – he was relieved. It wasn’t ruined. He was able to tell his friends and family that his records were intact.
He chuckled and then said, “Pat me on the back.”