DOES CLIMATE CHANGE MAKE HAILSTORMS MORE SEVERE?

The information below was sourced from Euronews.

In a 2021 paper in the Nature journal, scientists from Universität Bern, the University of New South Wales and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology investigated the impact of climate change on hailstorms.

“In most regions, hailstorm severity is expected to increase with climate change,” they concluded.

During a thunderstorm, up draughts of wind carry drops of water into the atmosphere. When the air is cold enough, these drops freeze.

As moisture from the air gathers on the outside of the frozen droplets, they grow bigger.

A stone will keep growing until the updraught holding it up can no longer support it.

If there is a lot of moisture in the air, and the wind holding it up is very strong, a hailstone will grow bigger.

Climate change makes these conditions more likely, as warmer air contains more water vapour.

Powerful storms - with powerful up draughts - also become more likely as weather patterns change.

Although the ‘melting point’ - the height at which hail starts to melt before hitting the ground - will rise as the earth heats up, this won’t prevent giant hail.

While small stones will melt into rain, big stones fall more quickly, so they won’t always melt before reaching earth.

“As a result of anthropogenic warming, it is generally anticipated that low-level moisture and convective instability (the ability of an air mass to resist vertical motion) will increase, raising hailstorm likelihood and enabling the formation of larger hailstones,” the study warns.