November 16, 1998 transcript # 260-1
Subject(s): hail
Title: Blizzards Of Hail

Unless you live on the Great Plains, you may only get a hailstorm once or twice a year. And chances are, you've probably never seen hail much bigger than-- say-- a marble or enough hail to cover the ground. Now imagine a thunderstorm sitting over you for two hours and dropping enough hail to pile up three feet deep! Hi, I'm Dave Thurlow and this is The Weather Notebook.

It sounds more like a blizzard than a thunderstorm, but that's what happened in Calgary, Alberta, on July 16, 1996. A slow-moving storm produced golf-ball sized hail that piled up about six inches deep on flat ground. But, thanks to torrential rains that accompanied the hail more than an inch of rain fell in just fifteen minutes a stream of water provided a current to move the hail into low-lying areas, where it drifted into deep piles.

The same thing happened a few years earlier in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Like Calgary, Cheyenne sits on the east side of the Rockies. That's where the moist air from the East runs into the high altitude of the West. And, Cheyenne is on the edge of what's known as "Hail Alley", the most likely spot in the nation-- maybe in the world, for that matter-- for hail. And on August 1, 1985, Hail Alley lived up to its name. Cheyenne got six inches of hail and six inches of rain. When the two joined forces, the hailstones piled up as much as eight feet deep in some places. Cars were buried, basements were flooded with ice, and eleven people drowned in the icy floodwaters.

Today's contributing writer is Bob Henson. Our series' Senior Editor is Jay Allison. The Weather Notebook is underwritten by Subaru, the beauty of all wheel drive, with major support provided by the National Science Foundation.