Then came the on-the-ground photos, calls, tweets, Facebook posts and other witness accounts of hail bigger than baseballs pounding the windward side.
"It’s unprecedented to see hail that large here in Hawaii. So it’s a tough decision to tell people they’re about to see an historic event in a weather warning. You’ve never seen this before, you’ve never heard of this before," said Robert Ballard of the National Weather Service.
The largest hail stones fell just before 6 a.m. And they were huge.
"Golfball is about 1-3/4 inch, baseball is 2-3/4 inch, and we were getting a lot of reports between 2, 2-1/5 and possible 3-inch hail," Ballard says. "We don’t have any reports in our records, and I believe they go back at least into the 1950s even before, of hail larger than that."
The biggest prior was 12 years ago in Hana, Maui at 1 inch. To the people who scooped up Friday morning’s crop, don’t make a cocktail with it yet — the weather services wants to see it.
"We’re asking people to save their large hail stones in the freezer so that we can maybe take a look later on and try to ascertain what happened," Ballard says.
For those wondering how it could happen on a tropical island, experts explain it as ice cubes being shot out of a thunderstorm.
"It doesn’t take long to get from heights of, say, 25,000 feet, which is where we saw some of the hail this morning when it started, all the way to the ground," Ballard says.
But what seems a freak storm actually happens a couple times a year with hail up to and inch and a half in the atmosphere and remaining off shore.
See the original article at: KHON2 Local News
