Spring Is The United States Storm Season: Dramatic Videos Prove It

Damage from an extreme hailstorm in Springfield, Missouri
in April. Video of the storm is in this post, Photo from 
Springfield Daily Citizen via Facebook

As we all know, spring is the tornado and storm season in the United States. That always leads to some pretty dramatic videos.   

We've got some of them here to let you gawk at Ma Nature at her angriest. Let's get right to it: 

During an outbreak of tornadoes on April 17, the town of Lena, Illinois was hit hard. The tornado was seriously wrapped in rain, so you couldn't see the actual funnel. 

And the parts of town that weren't' actually hit by the tornado were hammered by a wall of intense rain and wind that did its own damage .

The tornado itself was an EF-2 with top winds of 130 mph. 

The video is a web cam that recorded the maelstrom moving into the city. Click on this link to view, or if you see the image below, click on that. 

Also, there's another Lena web cam that has a different perspective basically overlooking the entire town. Click on this link to view that one. 

In our next video, we see the benefits of obeying the safety rules when a tornado seems imminent. 

Two women were keeping track of a tornadic storm on their phones as they sat in the kitchen of a Minnesota home. 

When the wind suddenly picked up. The women quickly decided to run downstairs, with their two dogs in tow.  See in the video what happened next. Spoiler: The women made the right decision. Click on this link to view, or if you see the image below, click on that. 

On April 23, a massive tornado, an EF-4 with top winds of 170 mph, struck part of northern Oklahoma. It hit the southern edge of Vance Air Force Base before sliding along the southeast corner of Enid, Oklahoma.  It wiped out about 40 homes in a subdivision, but miraculously didn't kill anybody. There were ten relatively minor injuries.

The video below shows that as bad as this tornado was, things would have been much, much worse, had its path been the same, except displaced a little bit to the northwest. Enid is a city with a population of about 51,000. Had it gone through the middle of town, the destruction would have been extreme 

The video is a time lapse from a web cam that overlooks downtown Enid. You can see the tornado come  in from the right side of the view.  It eventually gets lost in an area of torrential rain, but it was still causing its damage even when it was invisible in the rain. 

Click on this link to view, or if you see the image below, click on that.

Springfield, Missouri was hammered by a huge hailstorm on April 28. Some of the stones were at least softball sized, so you can imagine the damage. Sadly, the hail killed an emu at the local zoo. An unknown number of cars were damaged or destroyed, but the number of vehicles wrecked had to be in the thousands.  

At the Springfield-Branson National Airport, hundreds of cars left in the parking lot by people who flew to wherever were trashed, with busted out windows and huge dents. 

Per the Washington Post: 

"Some passengers had to be buses around 100 miles away to the airport in Bentonville, Arkansas because rental cars were damaged. (Airport Public Information Officer Ren) Luebbering said airport staff spent three hours covering the most badly damaged vehicles with donated tarps. 'We think we put 300 or 400 tarps out there on cars," Luebbering said. The airport warned online, 'Expect damage to your vehicle."

Click on this link to view, or if you see the image below, click on that. 

Here's another view of the chaotic Springfield, Missouri hail storm. Again, click on this link to view, or if you see the image below, click on that. 

 On April 28, an EF-3 tornado caused a lot of damage in Mineral Wells, Texas. The tornado was wrapped in rain and hard to see. In this video. people in a car inadvertently drive to very near the edge of the tornado. The wind is howling on this freeway and debris fills the air. Pretty scary! As always, click on this link to view, or if you see the image below, click on that. 

During another round of severe weather in the South,  storm chaser Daniel Shaw was driving near Monterey, Louisiana. They didn't see any tornadoes, but the lightning really put on a show. The video shows plenty of lot of lightning strike and Shaw kept saying they are not getting out of the vehicle. 

The end of the video is what really shocks, literally. Shaw is parked in a Family Dollar parking lot when the building gets hit by lightning. Let's 

 As always click on this link to view, or if you see the image below, click on that: 

Storm chaser Aaron Rigsby's videos often make an appearance in these video highlight posts I occasionally issue. This is not technically one of Rigsby's videos but he stars in it. 

That same batch of lightning barrages affected Rigsby. He was chasing severe storms in Mississippi when lightning struck the Toyota Rav 4 as he sped down a highway. The car is toast.  Rigsby said he is OK, but felt the buzz of electricity when it struck.  He got into another storm chaser's car to continue the hunt for tornadoes.

Inside Edition has the story. Click on this link to view, or if you see the image below click on this. 

So here's something different: A time lapse of an enormous iceberg passing by the town of Ilulissat, Greenland on April 13.  Looks like a mountain kind of saying, "never mind me, just passing through, I'll be out of here in no time. Click on this link to view, or if you see the image below, click on that. 

"Gorilla Hail" Has Been Pounding The U.S. This Year, And It's Likely More Common Than Previously Thought

Giant hail in Wisconsin this past April.

It's been another rough year for hail storms in the United States. There's been lots of them and a few of them have been real standouts. 

Probably the most newsworthy and perhaps most extreme was the one that hit Springfield, Missouri and nearby areas on April 28. 

Baseball to softball sized hail laid wasted to probably thousands of cars. Sadly, an emu died from the hail at Dickerson Park Zoo in Springfield. Zoo workers tried their damndest to get all the zoo animals under cover. 

An emu's natural instinct is to lie down and take cover, and this emu, a 21 year old female named Adam, couldn't be coaxed indoors and died when a huge hailstone landed on his head. 

Back on March 10, a supercell that produced a destructive tornado in Kankakee, Illinois also produced immense hail that might have broken the record for the largest hailstone in Illinois history. It measured 6.616 inches in diameter and weighed 1.22 pounds. In other words, it was a little larger than a grapefruit. 

Officials are verifying those measurements before declaring it a record holder. In any event huge hailstones damaged homes in Kankakee that were never touched by the tornado.

The tornado, with maximum winds of 150 people killed three people. 

Even here in Vermont, we managed to see some rare or us golf ball sized hail on April 16 when a supercell thunderstorm crossed west to east across central Vermont. The supercell is the one that ultimately produced a brief tornado in Williamstown. 

GORILLA HAIL

Reed Timmer, one of the more popular and prolific storm chasers out there, coined the term "gorilla hail" to describe especially ferocious hailstorms with especially huge hailstones. 

Gorilla hail is generally defined as hailstones with a diameter of at least two inches, which is about the size of a lime.

Big hailstones are expensive. Replacing a hail-damaged roof can cost $15,000 or more, though homeowners;' insurance usually covers that. (On that note, a spoiler:  Look for an upcoming piece on how State Farm is allegedly doing everything they can to not pay for hail damaged roofs).

Fixing a hail-damaged vehicle can cost several thousand dollars, but if the damage is severe enough, insurers will just total the car.  

Hail costs an estimated $15 billion in damage to homes, buildings, vehicles and crops each year in the U.S. 

Hail-prone cities and their surrounding suburbs continue to expand, providing more targets for potential gorilla hail. That's helping to cause hail costs to spiral upward. 

NOT SO RARE?

It seemed fortunate that "gorilla hail," with stones the size of baseballs, softballs, grapefruit or even worse, was considered relatively rare. But maybe not. 

New research in recent years suggest "gorilla hail" has always been more common than we thought. And super giant hail might be becoming more frequent. 

It was thought that hail stones six inches in diameter or greater were exceedingly rare. But new research suggests maybe those gargantuan icy meteors aren't quite as rare as we thought.  

Per Washington Post:

"'I think six inches plus is happening on a yearly basis,' said Victor Gensini, a professor at Northern Illinois University, in a recent interview. "I think it's a matter of who's finding it, who's looking for it. When you're actually out there looking for it, four-plus-inch hail is maybe not that rare."

Most of these giant hailstones are happening in fairly remote areas, where people aren't around to observe them before they melt. Or, since such large hail is so dangerous, and maybe accompanied by ferocious, damaging winds or even tornadoes, people who would otherwise find them are wisely hunkering down in basements and storm shelters.

Besides, most big hail stones shatter upon impact. To find these hail stones, you need a road that happens to lead where the biggest hail stones landed, Gensini said. Most hail falls over open fields. Good luck finding the biggest stones before they start to melt. 

Thunderstorms that produce gargantuan hail can't actually have too much water in therm. Storms with incredible amounts of rain tend not to produce the biggest hail. Bigger hail also seems to fall when a small storm merges with a large supercell that is already producing hail.

The bad news from all this research is that future storms might produce bigger hail, thanks, once again, to climate change. 

The Washington Post tells us:

"Gensini published a paper in 2024 that suggests less hail will occur overall, ut there will be more instances of giant hail. Why? Warming temperatures in the lower atmosphere will melt some of the small hailstones. Yet big stones fall fast enough through the warmer lower atmosphere that they have little time to melt. And with more thunderstorm fuel overall thanks to a warming world, there could be more of them."

We will probably get more and more new reports of giant hail simply from better technology. At least 90 percent of hailstones shatter or break on impact, and the rest start to melt immediately.  

Researchers are starting to use photogrammetry, a technique that uses trigonometry to estimate the sizeof objects caught on camera. (And you thought there was no use for trigonometry when you were back in high school!)

A hail specialist at Penn State used the technique to estimate the size of a gorilla hailstone that fell on an Argentinian with in 2018.  He found the hailstone to be 7.4 to 9.3 inches in diameter. A woman found a 7.1 inch diameter hailstone just after the storm ended, collaborating the photogrammetry. The woman's hailstone was a bit smaller as it had already started to melt.

Gorilla hail is terrifying and incredibly destructive. You don't want to get caught in any of these storm. Here's hoping you don't experience one of those storms!