Record hail

The record for hail found in Arkansas since 1980 is 5 inches in diameter — slightly larger than a DVD.

Dennis Cavanaugh, the National Weather Service warning coordination meteorologist at Little Rock, says three documented hailstones share the record. They fell:

■ May 4, 2020, in Johnson (Washington County)

■ April 2, 2006, 2 miles north of Searcy (White County)

■ Jan. 21, 1999, in Newark (Independence County).

Big as they were, they fell short of the largest officially recognized record hailstone in the United States. It fell near Vivian, S.D., on July 23, 2010. Its longest diameter was 8 inches.

On June 19, 2019, grapefruit-size hail estimated to be 5 inches fell at Vandervoort in rural Pike County. One clobbered Justin Bond’s mother’s car windshield. Bond posted a photo of a knobby, asymmetrical hailstone on Twitter (see arkansasonline.com/912bond).

“A research group was very interested in the hailstone and sent out a team with sophisticated 3D laser scanners and a scale (for weight),” Cavanaugh wrote in an email. These were researchers from the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety’s IBHS Hail Study.

“The ‘record largest hail’ in the United States was measured at 8 inches, but hail is measured by its longest diameter, not its weight,” Cavanaugh wrote. “From what we can tell, despite the fact that the research team found the Vandervoort hailstone falling just short of the state record hail size (it measured 4.6 inches in diameter), it actually weighed a bit more than the Vivian, S.D., 8-inch hailstone.

“The Vivian hailstone must have been much longer than its width, cutting down on its weight.”

Baseball-size hail has been observed in Arkansas at least once a year since 1980, with the exception of 2005 and 2013.

According to an agency roundup of Arkansas weather statistics, so far in 2022 there was 4.5 inch hail at New Blaine in Logan County on April 11; and during storms April 15, 4.25-inch hail fell at Cherokee Village in Sharp County and 4-inch hail fell west of Viola in Fulton County and at Lake City in Craighead County (see weather.gov/media/lzk/StormsOf2022.pdf).