Hailstorm

“ With all the other aerial and other convulsions of nature, a hailstorm, covering an enormous area, will be one of the horrors, when, putting the weight of the stones at the lowest average, they will probably be quite a hundred-weight each. ”

“ Undoubtedly there are also whirlwinds in the cloud, similar to those that sometimes visit the earth, which would tend to gather up the hailstones and aggregate them into large masses. It is a mighty battle between the moisture-laden, superheated air, ascending from the surface of the earth, and the powers residing in the upper regions of cold. Nature is constantly struggling to find an equilibrium of her forces, and a hailstorm is only one of the little domestic flurries that take place when she is setting her [Pg 127] house to rights. ”

“ The evidence on the question of hailstorms is conflicting, but we may say that the popular impression can be explained on the ground that hail naturally does more damage to tender crops than to forest trees, and that the damage in the former case would attract, in the latter would largely escape notice. Further, as regards storms and high winds in general, forests do, as has been seen, tend to check wind velocity, and thus to reduce the local violence of a gale. ”

“ The winds at these times generally elect to blow off the mountains, and are so piercingly cold that it is extremely difficult to keep warm, but it is a most healthy and bracing cold. In spring and early summer the hailstorms do great damage to the early crops, and the thunderstorms all through the hot weather are very severe, the lightning fatalities being by no means infrequent. ”

“ The possible mechanical lift due to the sea-breeze. There is no doubt that this has often been the cause of thunderstorms. There was a case some years ago of a heavy hailstorm over the Mount Lofty ranges when a light northerly wind and apparently humid drift was lifted by a sea breeze.
(6) A comparison of surface temperature and humidity data from inland suburbs with the radio-sonde station and the possibility of constructions a composite pusdeo-diagram. This construction may be open to question. However we might say that at least a thunderstorm was likely over somewhere in the area. ”

“ This summer hailstorms were more general and more severe in the Transvaal than for some time past. A bad storm baffles description. The size of the hailstones is only one of the factors—a strong wind enormously increases the destructiveness ”

“ Several interesting matters are raised by this article. They are ―
(1) The influence of sea-breezes on the uplift of the overlying air and, hence on convectional cloud and thunderstorm formation in certain favourable cases;
(2) The maximum size of hailstones;
(3) The vertical currents associated with hailstones and with the pressure rise in thunderstorms ”

“ Hailstones are made in quite a different way from snow flakes. Snow falls only in the winter, but hail storms come in summer, on hot days. Weather men think that when rain drops are formed in clouds, and are all ready to fall, they are suddenly pulled up much higher, into freezing air. The rain drops freeze but do not burst. Then they fall through other rain clouds, and more water freezes on the balls of ice. They are tossed up and down until they become so heavy that they drop like bullets. They drop so fast that they pass through the warm air near the earth without melting. ”

“ On the top of the world the storms work all their fury. Only there come mist and wind and rain, thunder and lightning and hail together—the pitiless terrible hail: there, where the hare hiding in the grass may know it is the highest thing in all God’s world, and nearest to the storm—the one clear mark to draw the lightning—and, knowing, scurries to the sheltered slopes. ”

“ The wind took the multitudinous sounds,—the cries of frightened birds, the creaking trees, the snap of breaking boughs, the crash of falling giants, the rush of the rain, the drumming of the hail,—enwound them with itself, and made the forest like a great shell held close to the ear.
There was no house to flee to; so long as we could face the hail we staggered on, heads down, buffeting the wind; but at last, the fury of the storm increasing, we were fain to throw ourselves upon the earth, in a little brake, where an overhanging bank somewhat broke the wind. ”

“ Why is it supposed that the electrical state of the air and the clouds affects the formation of hail?
Because hail is more common in the summer than at other seasons, and is frequently attended by storms of thunder and lightning.
450. Why do hail-storms most frequently occur by day?
Because the clouds, being charged with vapour to saturation, favour the formation of hail by sudden electrical or atmospheric changes. In the gradual cooling of night, the clouds would expend themselves in rain. ”

“ A light grey cloud appears in the distance, and as it approaches you, it sends forth lightnings, accompanied with hurried bursts of thunder. A furious storm of hail or snow immediately follows. The howl of the tempest rises to a yell, and the squall, as it sweeps along in its fury, cuts off the tops of the waves, and scatters them in foam over the surface of the deep like a mantle of snow. ”

“ One may well account for the formation of the hailstone by assuming that its alternating layers of snow and ice are caused by the horizontal roll of a thunderstorm, the under part of which has a temperature at or above freezing and the upper half much below freezing. A raindrop is formed in the lower part, frozen in its course through the upper part, receives a fresh coating of water or snow with each revolution and a freezing before its circuit is completed. It thus gains in size until it becomes too heavy to be sustained by the whirling storm-cloud, when it falls to earth. ”

“ The great hail-storm beat down fields of corn and cut off branches from the trees, and the wind in many places twisted the trunks to splinters. Lightning flashed through the heaven all night long in great zigzag streaks, thunder crashed, and the earth shook. ”

“ For, if there had been at times wild goings on upon the summit during the morning, they were merely a faint prelude to the elemental strife which now raged around. The wind roared and the hail hissed in fiendish rivalry, and yet both seemed silenced when the awful crashes of thunder burst above and about us. We were in the very central track and focus of the storm, and, as we sat crouched upon the floor, the ground and the building seemed to reel beneath the roar of the detonations, and our heads almost to swim with the fierce glare of the lightning. ”

“ Not a sound breaks the magic of repose. What is that—a strange, pattering noise, as of a million of fairy feet? It is hail—yes, a hail-storm has burst over the city. Leaves are dashed from the trees, mingled with small boughs; windows that lie most opposed to the direct fury of the pelting particles of ice are broken, and the rapt repose that before was so remarkable in its intensity, is exchanged for a noise which, in its accumulation, drowns every cry of surprise or consternation which here and there arose from persons who found their houses invaded by the storm. ”

“ It seems as if heavy hailstones were rattling down, but they are only rain-drops which bear with them in falling the up-whirled dust and sand. Now the flashes are seen. One follows so quickly upon another that we are forced to close our dazzled, well-nigh blinded, eyes, and to follow the storm only by listening to the uninterrupted roll of the thunder. The downpour becomes a cloud-burst; from the hills the water rushes down everywhere in streams; in the hollows it forms lakes; in the valleys there are rivers in flood. ”

“ The falling rain—and also the hail which occasionally attends a thunder-storm—cools the air through which it passes and the cold air sinks to the earth with a considerable velocity. As it reaches the earth the down-rush plows underneath the warm, moist air in front of the storm, lifting it and thereby aiding the updraught. As the cold air spreads over the ground its velocity is great enough to raise clouds of loose dust that almost always precede the fall of rain. ”

“ Hail is rain that happens to be caught in a powerful current of rising air as it forms, and is carried up so high that it freezes in the cold, expanding air into little balls of ice, or hail stones, which fall to the ground before they have time to melt.
Why one side of a mountain range usually has rainfall. When air that is moving along reaches a mountain [pg 287] range, it either would have to stop, or rise and go over the mountain. The pressure of the air behind it, moving in the same direction, keeps it from stopping, and so it has to go up the slopes and over the range. ”

“ Hail appears to be formed in the violent updraft of air at the front of a thunderstorm. In this turbulent region the hailstone, first frozen at a high level, probably makes several journeys alternately up and down, as it encounters stronger or weaker rising currents; at one time gathering a coating of snow aloft, and at another a coat of ice from the rain below, until finally, on account of its large size or on account of a weakening of the upward blast, it falls to the ground. ”

“ And straight a stony shower
Of monstrous hail does downward pour,
Such as ne'er Winter yet brought forth,
From all her stormy magazines of the north:
It all the beasts and men abroad did slay,
O'er the defaced corpse, like monuments, lay;
The houses and strong-bodied trees it broke,
Nor asked aid from the thunder's stroke:
The thunder but for terror through it flew,
The hail alone the work could do.
The dismal lightnings all around,
Some flying through the air, some running on the ground,
Some swimming o'er the waters' face,
Filled with bright horror every place ”

“ It is by applying these laws, and drawing conclusions from them, that the prophet of the weather is able to tell so nearly what kind of a day we shall have, and just about where and when the storm will come.
Nearly all great storms have a rotary, or cyclonical character. The little whirlwinds we often see on windy days, when the dust is caught up and whirled around, are miniature examples of great storms which sweep around immense circles. Almost all great rain, hail, and snow storms revolve in this manner around a calm center where the mercury is low in the tube of the barometer. ”

“ The storm of the hour is lengthened into one of days. It becomes a deluge of judgment on the earth. The words say seven days, but in such poetic discourse seven might perhaps simply mean “many”. Finally, there is a decided change in the scene. The flood has passed away. The death-destroying hail-storm falls upon us, not simply the little hail-stones, but the great hail-stones. ”

“ There is snow in yonder cold gray sky of the morning, and through the partially-frosted window-panes I love to watch the gradual beginning of the storm. A few feathery flakes are scattered widely through the air and hover downward with uncertain flight, now almost alighting on the earth, now whirled again aloft into remote regions of the atmosphere. These are not the big flakes heavy with moisture which melt as they touch the ground and are portentous of a soaking rain. It is to be in good earnest a wintry storm. ”

“ There was as much hail as rain; the stones of the bigness you find only in the tropics, where there [281] is plenty of lightning to manufacture them, and the sound of the downrush as it struck the deck and set the sea boiling was so deafening that, though the thunder was roaring almost overhead, nothing was to be heard of it. The lightning was horribly brilliant, and the cabin seemed filled with the sulphur-smelling blazes, though there was only a comparatively small skylight for them to show through. ”

“ The size of a cloud may be such, or clouds may exist in different elevations, which in an upper region produce hail, in a lower region snow, and at a still lower elevation rain. Rain may also form in an upper region of the sky, and descend into a colder stratum of the atmosphere, and be frozen into hail. Hail generally precedes storms of rain.
Change of wind and the action of opposite currents, so necessary for the production of rain, are also frequent during hail-storms. While clouds are agitated with the most rapid motions, rain generally falls in greatest abundance ”

“ A storm, which had been fiercely raging for several days, gave no signs of exhaustion.—The snow, which had been falling for fifty or sixty hours—not in a fleecy shower, but mingled with cutting particles like hail—filled the atmosphere, and with each successive gust of a stiff northwester, was whirled aloft in vast curling sheets and wreaths—or driven through the narrow streets with a force that was blinding and almost irresistible. ”

“ Hail never falls in winter, only in summer, and almost always in connection with a thunderstorm. It is made by drops of moisture, like very fine rain, being carried by the strong upward currents of a thunderstorm to altitudes where the air is very cold, there becoming coated with a layer of snow, and becoming heavier, falling through the less active upward currents on the edge of a storm. As these snow-covered frozen raindrops fall through the clouds, they grow bigger, because on their cold snow surfaces the moisture condenses and is frozen to a skin of ice. ”

“ Then again utter darkness covers the earth, when suddenly a column of light appears, like the trunk of some tall pine, as the electric fluid passes from the upper to the lower regions of the world. The next instant its blazing summit breaks into splinters on every side. Occasionally fearful hail-storms sweep over the plains; and at other times the air from the south comes heated, as from a furnace, drying up all moisture from the skin, and parching the traveller’s tongue with thirst. ”