For as many years as I’ve been studying weather, severe hail has been considered to have a diameter of 3/4 inches. 

1 to 1.5 inch Hail....courtesy National Weather Service and NOAA

When we talk  about severe thunderstorms we look at wind gusts and hail size.  The criteria  has been wind gusts to 58mph and 3/4 inch hail or larger.  

Warnings are issued frequently while t’storms are in the area.  People became desensitized to the warnings and probably ignored them, which is unfortunate.  The new Severe Thunderstorm Warning criteria for hail is now one inch in diameter, or about the size of a quarter.  After being used in the central United States last year, this criteria is now used nationwide, including here in Southern New England.   The National Weather Service in Taunton issues Severe Thunderstorm Warnings for our area.

How will this impact you?  You will likely see less of our “Live Pinpoint Doppler 12 Weather Alerts”.   The weather crawls, as we call them, on the bottom of your screen will be seen less often.  We usually reserve the full blown weather cut-ins (where we cut into regular programming with a meteorologist) for the most severe of storms (for example the tornado in Barrington/Warren/Swansea in July of 2008).   The number of those full blown weather cut-ins probably won’t change. 

I like the idea of changing the criteria size to 1″.  I often thought that we were issuing Warnings when storms really weren’t too bad.  This thunderstorm season, take what we say seriously because 1″ hail can really do significant damage.   According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, hail damage approaches $1billion in the United States every year and that may be a low estimate.

The most impressive hail storm in my mind was on June 24th, 2008.  That was a crazy summer anyway.  Here’s a weather year in review video of 2008.  Watch the hail floating down the streets of Pawtucket.