MARYLAND — It is Severe Storms Awareness Week in Maryland! This week is designed to make you aware of the various severe weather threats that can impact us. It's important to understand different aspects of severe storms, and what you can do to stay safe. Each day this week features a severe storm threat and today's threat is hail.
Hail consists of balls of ice that develop when there is extreme turbulence within a strong thunderstorm updraft. The rain inside of a thunderstorm goes through a process where it will freeze, melt, and then re-freezes in very cold areas of the atmosphere. The ice pellets begin to grow larger and larger as more layers of ice collide with the balls of ice. The updraft can't continue to support them when the become too heavy, so they fall has hail.
In order for hail to be considered "severe", it has to be at last 1" in diameter (the size of a quarter).
Since 1950, there has only been four instances where hail measured 4"+ in Maryland.
The largest hailstone ever recorded in Maryland since 1950 was 4.5" (the size of a grapefruit). This occurred twice, once on April 28th, 2002 in Charles county (from the La Plata EF-4 tornado), and the other on June 18th, 1970 in the Phoenix/Jacksonville area of Baltimore county.
The most recent case of 4" sized hail in Maryland was on June 23, 2015 near Timonium in Baltimore county. The larger the hail, the more dangerous the storm. If you see hail falling from the sky, move indoors quickly!
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