• DOI:10.1080/00431672.2010.503841
• Corpus ID: 191481064

Deep Hail: Tracking an Elusive Phenomenon

@article{Schlatter2010DeepHT,
  title={Deep Hail: Tracking an Elusive Phenomenon},
  author={Thomas W. Schlatter and Nolan J. Doesken},
  journal={Weatherwise},
  year={2010},
  volume={63},
  pages={35 - 41}
}

• T. Schlatter, N. Doesken
• Published 11 August 2010
• Environmental Science
• Weatherwise

Weatherwise’s “Weather Queries” column is sometimes presented with questions that require more space than can be devoted to them in the regular column to answer them fully. Recently, David Nolan of Mills Lake, Wisconsin, asked one such question—about deep hail. He queried: “What is the deepest hail accumulation over a one-square-mile area ever recorded in the United States, not drifted by wind or washed into piles?” Surprisingly, as posed, this question is unanswerable because there are no data on one-square-mile accumulations of hail. Even Storm Data, a monthly publication of the National Climatic Data Center that lists all severe storms observed in the United States, does not have information on deep accumulations of hail; until January 1, 2010, hail had to be at least three-quarters inch in diameter for a storm to be classified as severe. Now the criterion is one inch. Most occurrences of deep hail involve smaller hail, and thus they would not be recorded in Storm Data except accidentally. Neither is there a standard or widely accepted definition of “deep hail,” so we propose one here: