Some unfortunate Minnesotans had their homes and cars (and heads!) damaged by hail Tuesday evening. Bummer. I hope all repairs and recovery go smoothly.
Most of the weather reports I heard last night kept to the standard American sports scale of measurement – marble sized to golf ball to baseball to softball. That’s assuming you consider marbles a sport.
But I wonder – is that our entire athletico-spherical vocabulary? What about handballs? Raquetballs? I’ve never heard a weather forecaster try to parse relative hardness of hail, though it does vary. If your job is to encourage people to take cover, you would naturally go with the most impressive choice and baseballs and billiard balls are more motivational than tennis balls.
A lacrosse ball is smaller around (7.5 inches) than a baseball (9 inches), could offer a useful distinction, but you never hear meteorologists talk about “lacrosse ball sized hail’. I assume In England and India a handy frame of reference would be “Hail the size of cricket balls.” Try that over here and people would be confused. Cricket balls? Aren’t they very, very tiny?
Not everyone follows sports, so sometimes we use the vegetable scale, starting with pea sized hail and going to … well, that’s about it. I guess we’re just not a vegetable-loving people. Has anyone ever reported brussel sprout sized hail? Hail as large as neatly trimmed radishes? And what about the rest of the grocery store? Hail the size of eggs? Lemons? There’s a report on this page of hail as big as walnuts. Has any spot on Earth ever received Personal Watermelon sized hail, and if so, did anyone live to tell about it?
Not that all hail is perfectly round. In fact, it can be flattened and oblong, but I’m still waiting to hear about a storm that dropped “hail the size of Vienna Fingers” or “cell phone sized hail”.
Then there’s the monetary scale. Dime, penny, nickel, quarter and even half dollar sized hail have been noted, but why stop there? What about “hail as destructive as bundled sub-prime mortgages”? I would run from “Bernie Madoff hail”, and cower at a report that claimed: “hail just swept through Eden Prairie like a mammoth Ponzi scheme, leaving no one untouched.”
What’s the biggest hail you’ve seen? And how would you standardize the measurment?
Trail Baboon 
Dale – more time in the produce section for you. Brussel sprout-sized hail, pepper-sized hail, artichoke-sized hail, turnip-sized hail, parsnip-sized hail. And if we wander to the fruit side of produce: lime-sized hail, grape-sized hail, tomato-sized hail, avocado-sized hail and my favorite: mango-sized hail!
LikeLike
Excellent, VS.
“Tomato-sized hail” sounds like a bad review, doesn’t it? And what kind of tomato? Plum, Big Boy, Beefstake, grape, cherry? And what would it mean if we got hail the size of vine-on tomatoes?
LikeLike
and I am thinking that the tomato hail would be more likely to splat than others.
LikeLike
Having been under large hail, I would never hope to experience a storm with balls the size of normal tomatoes! I would be the splatee, not the hail.
LikeLike
Rise and Shine Baboons!
Last night during the hail we were at the Guthrie. They interrupted the First Act (Arsenic and Old Lace) with an announcement, then prolonged the intermission about 45 minutes, so we arrived home about midnight. On a School Night! We did not hear or see the hail since they would not let us out of the theater. But we heard it hammered the Target Field. Biggest hail–about the diameter of a quarter. Biggest benefit: 1998–new roof after hail ruined the roof of our house.
LikeLike
Worst hail I was ever in was 13 years ago-I know because it was the summer before the s&h was born-some of you will remember it was the year of the St Peter tornado or the straightline winds that decimated so many roofs and trees in St Paul.
The hail in Decorah was probably golfball sized and level of hardness. Bald men got bruised heads from it and my porch door window was broken.
A couple of weeks later, I had moved to St Paul and in another storm, the power line ended up falling across Grand Avenue, right out my front door. Power company came and put up a sawhorse to deter drivers, but I did see one intrepid woman get out of her car and move the roadblock so she could drive under the felled power line.
Fortunately, I did not have to call the people who give out the Darwin Awards.
LikeLike
CLAVEN ALERT
Perhaps hail measurers could start to use orchidometers. These medical devices are not for measuring flowers , but rather allow endocrinologists to standardize the measurement of boys’ testicles. If you use Google image you can see both flat and 3D standards of comparison.
You, Cliff, and the rest of the troop can return to a normal state of readiness.
LikeLike
I think that is a wonderful idea and we should contact the National Weather Service about it.
LikeLike
Dear Cliffy, i think i’ve mentioned before, that measurement is suggested for goat bucks also. the orchidometer is a tape measure. needs to be 10 inches in circumference. i’m not doing it.
LikeLike
and then how would one measure those cricket balls that Dale mentioned? hmmm?
LikeLike
Nothing memorable in terms of size, but I do recall hail that left enough behind to make it look like it snowed.
As for sizing, how about animals?…ant sized, beetle sized, field mouse sized – we could say it’s going to hail cats and dogs (and really you oughta stay indoors for that).
LikeLike
In the 1950s my family took a trip to Minnesota for a two-week vacation (ah, the luxury of those slower times!). Just south of Saint Cloud we drove into a hail storm with cubes ranging from golf ball to almost baseball size. We were in our old 1947 Cadillac convertible (there’s a story about how we had such a car). Hail punched out the rear window and then began opening holes in the canvas top. In the back of the car, I threw my body over that of my little (nine-year-0ld) sister (which didn’t save her, but was oh-so-useful in later disputes for proving how generously I loved her!).
Saint Cloud was a mess. Remember the Standard Oil gas pumps with the porcelain crowns? Those were pounded into rubble. While we huddled in a cafe out of the storm we heard about a man who saw his neighbor’s dog take one on the noggin. The dog was being killed, lying in the storm. When the man went out on a rescue, he took one on the noggin and went down beside the dog. His wife dragged both of them to safety.
I gained respect for hail. Those stones were ice, not slush, although a “soft” ice compared to an ice cube.
LikeLike
I remember the 1998 storm really well. My folks just happened to be here and were actually at my place of employment to pick me up when the ice started to fall. Luckily the car was parked under a tree, so while some of my co-workers came out after the hail to broken windows, Civetta (red Honda Civic) just got a couple of little dents. My roof at home, however, was another matter.
LikeLike
There were a lot of great bargains after that storm on “new” cars that had pock-marked metal bodies, looking like some poor kid with a bad case of acne.
LikeLike
We don’t have many tornadoes out here and are more likely to have straight line winds. We have more than our share of hail storms. We had a roof replaced about 10 years ago because of a hail storm. Our elderly neighbors across the street are pretty good at predicting when a storm will produce hail. We find ourselves watching the sky and consulting with Martha and Ludwig about the probability of hail and wind when bad weather is approaching. They are pretty accurate. It seems that the amount of damage is related to the speed of the wind rather than the size of the hail stones.
LikeLike
Someone heard your call: Hill-Murray School uploaded a photo of lacrosse ball-sized hail: http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10150194335771545
LikeLike
Ha ha…. thanks Al!
LikeLike
don’t know the year – ’85 maybe – in the library at Virginia Tech trying to finish my thesis. a late afternoon storm, very common there in the summer, dropped buckets of rain. the the hail began – baseball size and pelting the side of the library that was all glass. everyone went to that side to watch. i was standing next to an African gentleman and he turned to me and said “what do you call that?”
when the rain stopped it was time to go home. at least six inches of water covered the whole grounds with the ice-balls floating like a big, cold drink. my car was about a block away so i took off my shoes and waded thru that icy mix. gosh, i can still remember that headache – worst i’ve ever had – but it went away as soon as my feet warmed up.
LikeLike
Good morning to all:
The largest hail that I think I have seen was about as big as a ping pong ball or a large radish if the vegetable scale is used. I don’t remember suffering any hail damage from that hail. I think nieghbors might have claimed some roof damage and received a payment.
When I did crop consulting I had a customer who wanted me to rate his crop for hail damage so that he could get an insurance payment. I do remember a storm that hit an area not far from where we lived that leveled crops and I think there was hail in that storm. I have seen a little hail damage in my garden.
I think some crop insurance people will pay for minor or almost no crop damage to keep their customers happy. A relative, who didn’t believe in insurance, was talked into buying crop insurance and then was not able to collect on it when he was sure he had hail damage. That made him even more convinced that one souldn’t buy insurance. His insurance agent apparently wasn’t the type that wanted to keep his customers happy.
LikeLike
Morning!
My wife was in Chanhassen last night for our sons Lacrosse game. The JV game was able to finish but Varsity was just warming up when the storm started. Kelly stayed in the car but also sent me pictures of hail about the size of a four cubic kumquat. She has a few dents in her car…
Crop insurance; when I was milking we never used crop insurance. Now that I’m cash crop I do crop and hail insurance. As Jim says, some adjusters are more liberal than others…
I hate paying the premiums but it has paid off a couple times.
I was with some friends that were camping along the Mississippi back about 1985 when a storm came through with ‘Butterfly yo-yo’ sized hail. We were in tents and you had to be careful not to be actually pressed against the tent fabric. I remember one girl getting smacked in the head because she was too close to the wall.
LikeLike
Ok, first of all, I won’t tell my Dad that there is any doubt about marbles as a sport. Dad frequently tells me that he was the marble champion of Cloquet as a kid.
When standardizing a *measurement (*note the spelling Dale, and you can thank my Germanic, twin-English degree holding, editor wife for badgering you) system, you really need some fixed baseline to measure from. The problem with tomatoes, potatoes, or even Mankatoes is that they’re size variable, so the reference breaks down. If hail is described as ‘tomato-sized,’ are we talking beefsteak or tomatillo sized? ‘Potato-sized’ hail could mean anything from Yukon Gold to baked-with-the-works. ‘Mankato-sized’ hail…does it include North Mankato or Skyline?
Early in his career as a weatherman, David Letterman once described hail as being “the size of canned hams.” With these kinds of food products, at least there is a standardization of rough size and weight. Imagine if hail were described as being ‘zucchini-sized’ or ‘pumpkin-sized’ given the wide variation we see every fall.
Certainly, we’ve seen measuring systems range from application-specific scientific (did you know that it’s currently 290 degrees Kelvin outside?) to amazingly aribtrary (King Henry III’s foot as being the standard measurement of a foot. Or the stem on champagne flutes measured by Marie Antoinette’s décolletage…has anyone else heard that one…?).
Perhaps we should opt for some kind of scale that people can grasp intuitively by tying it to pop culture references. ‘Hail that would dent Donald Trump’s hair.’ ‘Hail the size of a Kardashian’s IQ.’ ‘Hail the size of Jay Leno’s chin.’ I can just hear the broadcast, “Tonight, we have a 30% chance of hail that has a 10% chance of knocking some sense into Michele Bachmann.” Etc, etc, etc…
LikeLike
Excellent on MB, TG. And to hear him tell it, my dad was the marbles champion in Roland, Iowa in the early ’30s. David Letterman the Weatherman? Did not know that.
LikeLike
I saw Letterman doing the weather on a station in Indianapolis many years ago. I don’t remember much about how he did the weather. It was the era of weathermen with funny personalities and I think Dave did show a little of the personality that he uses now.
LikeLike
Marbles was one of my favorite things when I was young. Mostly I collected them and I also played marbles. There were two marble games. One where you put marbles in a ring and used shooters to knock them out of the ring. The other was throwing your marble at your rivals marble taking turns. You got to keep the marbles you hit.
LikeLike
Dad did ‘traditional’ marbles where you make a ring out of string and use your shooters to knock out your opponents’ marbles and you get to keep what you ‘capture.’
LikeLike
There was one weather guy who used to always talk about “pea to marble size” hail…but I always heard it as “pita marble size”.
LikeLike
I had kumquat sized hail last night at my house in Minneapolis. It was just a bit larger than a golf ball. (I saved a few for cocktails later).
My 18 year old son put on a helmet and went into his back yard with a baseball bat to try for an infield double…or something.
LikeLike
That would be worth bringing out the kodak…
LikeLike
Nice image, Thanks.
LikeLike
Don’t you love that he had the exceptional maturity to don the helmet? Many “men” his age have that confidence of indestructibility that leads them to believe they “don’t need no stinkin’ helmet.”
LikeLike
Great tales of weather battles worthy of minnesotans
I’ve never seen anything bigger than a walnut but that is enough. New roof last year new car in the big one in 98 or whenever it was
Love the reference to Mankato and I think it should include north Mankato and as for the orchidometer I don’t want to be visualizing testicles falling from the sky, it sounds painful but at least they are big enough to measure me.
LikeLike
I agree that vegetables don’t work well because there are seldom size constants. Even marbles, you’ve got your regular small and your shooters. I can’t remember any big hail stories, and I guess I should be glad about that. I did hear Tom Crann last night(driving home from choir practice after it was all over) talking about “egg sized hail” somewhere.
Off to Iowa, back on Saturday. Have a good, springy rest of week, Babooners.
LikeLike
Eggs can be quite variable too. Robin’s egg? Chicken egg? Young chicken, or a mature one? Ostrich egg?
LikeLike
I only know of one discussion in popular literature of different sizes of things like this. Don’t worry, those of you who already know the reference; I won’t quote it here. From “Four Weddings and a Funeral.”
LikeLike
OT. Just finished “One of Our Thursdays is Missing” – I highly recommend it!
LikeLike
Last week the e-mail flyer for the St. Agnes bakery sale mentioned “cherry malbec sourdough rugby balls” as one of the featured items. I didn’t really know what a rugby ball looks like, so I googled.
I bought a loaf – it isn’t really shaped much like a rugby ball. Darn tasty, though.
LikeLike
Makes me think I should get to a St. Agnes sale soon!
LikeLike