There was a comment about the hail story. Tom Morgan wrote: The hail story reminded me about a storm in Oct. of 2004 when we were living in Socorro, NM. Tennis ball sized hail! Half the roofs in town had to be replaced, sky lights were blown out and hundreds of cars were ruined in about 30 minutes. -Tom Morgan

Perhaps you'll be interested in what happened to one of those big hailstones . . . I had this today at 2:57 p.m. from Nolan Doesken at the University of Colorado:

Within the past hour, the largest fully-documented hail stone in terms of weight (1.94 pounds) and diameter (8.0 inches) has just reached its final resting place at the cold lab at the National Center for atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.. Henry Reges of the CoCoRaHS team had the honors of driving the 3rd leg of the relay that carried this stone successfully (carefully packaged and packed in dry ice) from the freezer of its finder in Vivian, South Dakota to the hail research facility in Boulder. The stone is now in the hands of Dr. Charles Knight who, interestingly, was already well established as a hail specialist back in 1970 when the Coffeyville, Kansas record hail stone was collected and documented.

The plans are to make a casting (mold) of this stone so that replicas can be displayed at the Historical Museum in Lyman County, South Dakota
and at the Aberdeen, SD National Weather Service Office. We'll also be posting some photos of the stone and its unveiling this AM in Boulder, CO.

Is this really the biggest hail stone ever to hit the U.S. -- well, probably not. Chances are a bigger stone fell sometime and somewhere. But the odds of capturing a stone this large and securing it intact are very low. So if you ever have giant hail (and please know "giant" is relative. In parts of the country anything over 2-3" is huge, up and down the Great Plains those size stones occur fairly often and you have to be in the 4-5" range to be really unusual. But anywhere in the country, stones over 5" in diameter are rare and well worth documenting.

By the way, it was 31 years ago today (I may be off a day or two) that Fort Collins was pummeled by large hail. I left town that day for a camping trip in Wyoming and didn't find out about if for over a week. Back then, the Denver Broncos had summer training camp here in Fort Collins so the big news story was all the fancy football player cars damaged by the hail. But the tragic part of the story was a local fatality where a baby was struck and killed while their panicked mother
ran carrying the child to shelter. There were also several injuries -- some broken arms with people covering their heads. So please remember, large hail is scary dangerous and deserves the greatest of respect.