Nebraska experiences the largest ever...
 

...hailstones!

I kid you not.

Unless Jessica Rowe (Aussie news reporter) is mistaken, and someone that goodlooking couldn't possibly be, Nebraska today experienced the largest hailstones ever recorded on Earth.

Apparently they were 'the size of cantelopes'. Now, i don't know if the cantelope is the metric unit for measuring hail, but thats FUCKEN BIG HAIL.

Anyone here from Nebraska? If so, is this true? And what the hell was it like?

Anyone else got any interesting hail stories?

I was in Sydney about 8 years ago when a huge hailstorm hit. I walked out of a surf shop to see what the hell was going on, just in time to see two men dragging an elderly lady out of it... and she had blood on her. Pretty major. These hailstones were said to be 'as big as cricketballs' (baseballs will do as a loose reference), which would equate to, maybe, 0.4 metric cantelopes...

Nebraska here...actually the hailstones were 1/8 inch smaller than the worlds record. Still...when you you get beaned on the noggin with a hailstone the size of a cantelope, does an eighth of an inch really matter? This was in central Nebraska, I'm in Omaha, so we didn't get that hail. The storm system that caused it, though, is sitting over us now. So far this storm system has caused 3 deaths (from tornados, not hailstones). :( It is forecasted to push out of here today.

Great, I'm flying to Omaha next friday. I hope the storm is gone then.

I read the cloud that dropped those was 9 miles high, causing an eclipse. Damn!

Published Tuesday
June 24, 2003
<size=4>Hear the one about volleyball-size hail?</size>
BY HENRY J. CORDES
OMAHA WORLD-HERALD STAFF WRITER

After getting reports of hailstones the size of volleyballs in Aurora, Neb., National Weather Service meteorologist Larry Wirth couldn't resist checking them out himself.
While he didn't find one quite that large, he was hardly disappointed. No matter what game you wanted to play, these stones were big.
One hailstone measured 61/2 inches in diameter and 173/8 inches in circumference. It's believed to be the biggest ever recorded in Nebraska and was just 1/8 inch less in circumference than the largest ever recorded nationally.
So large were these stones that they were leaving craters in the ground nearly a foot wide. One of the few that landed on a roof made a hole big enough for a man to crawl through.
"It was impressive," Wirth said of his visit to town Monday, one day after the storm that dropped the massive ice chunks in the south-central Nebraska town. "Even if they weren't as big as volleyballs, I'm sure the guy's eyeballs looked like volleyballs when they were falling down."
People in Aurora described the eerie scene Sunday as the massive balls of ice fell nearly straight down in the windless air and landed with audible thuds.
"I seen the first one come down, and I couldn't believe my eyes," said Dale Obermeier.
Surprisingly, the roof damage in Aurora was minor because the mega-hail was outnumbered, greatly, by pea-sized hail, said Marlin Hadenfeldt, an Aurora agent for State Farm Insurance.
But where the big stones did fall, they left an impression.
Wirth said he arrived in town and immediately was shown some of the craters 9 to 10 inches in diameter. Another crater was later found to measure nearly 14 inches in diameter. The stones that made them were long gone, broken up on impact and melted.

I was sitting here, reading this thread just amazed and thinking how bad that must have been, then I came across the above quoted line and burst out laughing. :lol:

man, we haven't even had rain yet in new mexico... thats crazy, how did it affect the corn rows and other crops?

Geez, glad I don't live in Nebraska. Hope everyone who does is alright and that you get no more hail.

This isn't unusual, severe storm clouds routinely top 50,000 feet/10 miles. Would have loved to chase this storm.

--
The only good weather is bad weather.

they did find one for the national record. 7 full inches in diameter. This one wasn't as big of news though since whoever saved it didn't report it for a couple of days.

I remember a big hailstorm in Sydney a few years back - but surely it wasn't 8 years ago... probably 98 or 99.. Just found it.. 14th April '99.

http://www.bom.gov.au/weather/nsw/se...pril1999.shtml

I remember a photo in the next day's paper of the Swans training at the SCG, and they were holding these big-arse ice chunks. Wrecked a lot of roofs in Surry Hills (and the scoreboard!)

I was actually in the city that day and for whatever reason decided to leave uni early and go home - I missed the action! :D

Yeah, i remember that one. I'm good mates with one of the Swans and was giving him shit about the photo...