If you’ve ever been in a hailstorm, you know that it can be pretty scary, but also kind of cool.
Seeing tiny beads of ice drop from the sky and bounce around on the ground or other objects is incredible.
While most hailstorms just produce relatively harmless hail, some of them can make hail that can cause serious damage to property, and even kill those unlucky enough to be caught outside when they hit.
In 1986, there was a hailstorm in the Gopalganj district of Bangladesh that produced hail weighing as much as 1.02 kilograms (2.2 pounds), which earned it a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records. Sadly, that storm also resulted in the deaths of 92 people.
Some experts believe that climate change will result in more events with very large hail, so they wanted to study it to see what could be learned.
To do this, a team of scientists collected large hail from a 2022 storm in Catalonia. Many residents picked up the larger pieces of hail and kept them in their freezer. The scientists borrowed them from the residents and began conducting their experiments. What they learned was published in Frontiers in Environmental Sciences.
In a press release, the senior author of the study, Professor Xavier Ubeda, who is a researcher at the University of Barcelona, commented:
“We wanted to use a technique that would provide more information regarding the internal layers of the hailstones, but without breaking the samples. We didn’t expect to obtain as clear imagery as we got.”
They were able to do this using computed tomography (CT) scans of the hail.
Professor Javier Martin-Vide is another researcher at the University of Barcelona, and a co-author on the study, said of this process:
“CT scans provide information related to the density, which allows us to identify the different stones’ layers associated with the growth stages of the hailstorm. They also help us understand the processes that contributed to its formation.”
Having this unbroken view of the entire structure of the hail may help with the future of forecasting for large hailstorms. The lead author of the study, Carme Farnell Barque, who is a researcher at the Meteorological Service of Catalonia, said:
“We show that the CT scanning technique enables the observation of the internal structure of the hailstones without breaking the samples. It is the first time that we have a direct observation of the entire internal structure of hailstones, which can provide clues to improve hail formation forecasting.”
You can see some of the largest hail ever caught on video falling from the sky in this brief video:
That hail sounds terrifying.
If you thought that was interesting, you might like to read about why we should be worried about the leak in the bottom of the ocean.