Hail!

I am still such a Kansas newbie as anyone would have been able to see on Monday night during the hailstorm. Why? All of us, DR, the kids and I were all standing on the front porch watching the hail come down. When it started I was putting Leola to bed and I stopped just to bring her and the boys outside to watch because they'd never seen it before. In the past it hail has always come after their bedtime. 

Hail, for me, is still a curiosity. In the two years we've been here I've seen hail 3 times which is just about the same number of times I saw hail in Indiana/Illinois in my 30+ years in that area. Hail is so common here that hardly anyone pays it any mind...unless you are a farmer worrying about what damage it's done to your wheat. 

The hail was falling for quite a while, probably a good five minutes. No one else was standing on their porches mesmerized by it I noticed. I was starting to get a bit worried though when the hail hitting my car sounded like a snare drum in a parade. No damage though (phew!) 

The boys were enjoying trying to catch the hail as it fell without getting hit by it, I wish I'd had video of that :) I was impressed with the size of the hail, marble size, until I started talking to my pastor about it. 

"Shoot!" he says, "I've seen hail as big as tennis balls that shattered car windshields!"

*Gulp* Really? (He's a pastor; he wouldn't lie!)

I can barely imagine golf ball size hail but tennis ball hail? I just hope I never have a picture of THAT to show you because I'm pretty sure I'd have to share some terrible car pictures as well! 

Cloud Seeding??? Really???

Have you ever heard of cloud seeding?

Up until a few days ago neither had I. DR directed me to a really good article here about cloud seeding in Kansas. When DR was first telling me what cloud seeding was I seriously thought he was joking!


Cloud seeding is an attempt to change weather conditions by shooting storm clouds full of silver iodide. Here's how it works (theoretically): Rain starts as tiny droplets of water suspended in clouds. Then the droplets clump together into bigger drops (or freeze together into bigger crystals). Once the drops or crystals are big and heavy enough, they fall out of the sky. The frozen drops can melt on the way down, becoming rain, or they can fall to the ground as snow. Cloud seeding aims to jump-start this process by helping droplets to clump or freeze together when they otherwise wouldn't. In some places cloud seeding is used to create moisture but it is used here in Kansas to break up the hail that is so common. Theoretically the silver iodide breaks up the hail to fall as rain. Of course with hail, that is so common in Kansas, comes hail damage and insurance companies are willing to pay for cloud seeding programs.


Cloud seeding is very controversial. Many people believe that instead of creating rain it prevents it from occurring and it could be harmful to the environment. DR knows a couple of farmers in the area who are both weather watchers and they both claim that cloud seeding doesn't work. There is a company to the west, by a couple counties, who performs cloud seeding and these weather watchers claim that these cloud seeding practices are taking away much needed moisture. Numerous times they've seen storms forming to the west only to be cloud seeded and the storm (and moisture) 'skips over' a 75 mile stretch of farm land here...all in order to prevent hail that 'might' be coming. I'm inclined to agree with the farmer that says, “I can raise crops with hail, But I can’t raise crops with no moisture.”

Now I'm all for supporting farmers and agriculture but sometimes I think humans are taking it too far. We are trying too hard to control things that we were never meant to have a hand in.....like weather. Southwest Kansas is a dry climate but for years farmers have been raising water dependent crops, like corn, and having to heavily irrigate their fields which is creating a water shortage in the aquifers. Now we are shooting chemicals up in the air? That can't be a good idea for anyone, especially when the science behind seed clouding is scanty and the evidence in favor of the practice is hard to find.


I've noticed that Nature pretty much knows what it's doing. And it was doing a fine job until mankind had so much technology at their fingertips. If we leave Nature alone and learn the way it works, and learn to work with it, I have a feeling we'd be better off.

Hail!!

Last week DR was out of town for four days. Usually this isn't a big deal; I even look forward to some evenings where I can fix pancakes for dinner and watch a girlie movie in the evening without DR complaining.

But on Thursday the sky looked like this. I wasn't too concerned because we weren't expecting any rain. I figured it was a storm just blowing past. It was pretty though.

And then, lo and behold, it started raining! Yay! I didn't have to water my garden that night. I even took a picture of the rain to prove to everyone that we really do get some rain in SW Kansas..ha!

But then...clink, clink, clink. Hail!

I ran to the backyard....more hail...and it. kept. coming!

My backyard was full of hail! I'd never seen so much hail in my life!

Back in Indiana I can only remember a few times that it ever hailed and then it left behind barely a handful of little ice balls.

Funny, that a bunch of high school kids actually came out to play in it! Of course when the hail came in hard they ran back inside. Wimps.

But I admit, being at home by myself with the kids, I got a bit wimpy too. It probably didn't help that the boys and I had recently read that tornadoes often come with hail. I packed a bag of clothes and food and water and flashlights and had it stashed in the basement. And I was glued to the back door...just waiting to hear a tornado! I probably would have been smarter to listen to the weather radio instead huh?

It rained for an hour and hail fell on and off that whole time. No tornadoes or hail damage. Just a very wet garden, thank goodness.

But what was really funny about this whole episode was when I talked to my neighbors the next day. I was expressing how there was "so much hail in my backyard" and "how  I was waiting for a tornado", my neighbors just looked at me shocked. "That kind of hail storm is normal here! It happens all the time.", they said.

So, one more thing about Kansas that is very different from good old Indiana. Hail is normal! But just because it's normal doesn't mean I have to like it!