Dale Farmer wrote:

Peter Kemp wrote:



On or about Mon, 19 Jan 2004 09:28:37 +0000, Alan Lothian
allegedly uttered:



In article , Keith Willshaw
wrote:


Hmmm, I suspect when dealing with a kg of water it makes a
big difference to the fan blades if that water is frozen
in a single lump.


Indeed. Strange to relate, more windscreens are smashed by hailstones
than by raindrops.


Hailstones can get rather larger than raindrops. In the various
updrafts within stormclouds the raindrops grow until they reach a size
at which they're too unstable in the airflows and fission into smaller
drops, hail just keeps growing until the updrafts can't keep them up.

I've never been hurt by rainfall, but one short shower of 1" hail left
me very battered, slightly dazed, and in need of a large drink and a
quiet lie down.



I'd be interested to know what experiments, if any,
the programme did in order to reach its conclusions. Obviously they are
quite correct about kinetic energy and momentum, but transfer of
momentum operates in many different ways depending very much on the
nature of the materials in which the transfer occurs.


I have to admit I missed the show and will keep an eye out for the
inevitable rerun as it would be one I'd like to see.
---
Peter Kemp

Life is short - Drink Faster



There was a hailstorm in Texas several years ago during a large outdoor
festival of some sort. Couple of folks maimed, lots hospitalized, millions
of
dollars in property damage. ( Broken glass, totaled cars, roof damage. )

--Dale




Storytellers like to toss around the phrase "_____ball-sized hail," the
diameter of the ball growing with the teller's brazenness. But back in
the late 70s, when I was working as an insurance adjuster in eastern end
of Tornado Alley (southern Illinois, Western Kentucky and Tennessee,
southwestern Missouri), I got a claim once where some folks on a farm
said they'd had some structures and vehicles damaged by "baseball-sized
hail." We'd heard such things around the office plenty of times, but
these folks had gone to the trouble to bag some of the stones and stick
them in a freezer. And they weren't exaggerating; somewhere I've still
got the Polaroids. Given that the projectiles in question had had a
chance to melt some -- it was summer, after all -- before the insureds
figured it was safe enough to go outside and assess, it's possible they
had been the size of softballs when they came down. The tin roof on
their tractor shed looked life it'd been hit with cluster bomblets.

That area sees some pretty extreme weather phenomena. My dad still
lives there; he says that a twister that came through last summer and
killed a couple people just a mile from his house was so powerful it
pulled utility poles straight out of the ground without breaking them.
He'd been in the claims business for 30 years, and maintains it was the
most awe-inspiring damage he'd ever personally witnessed.