It has been a frenetic severe weather season for Colorado, and one storm officially entered the record books after a massive hailstone it spawned shattered a state record.
Published Aug 16, 2023 2:59 PM EDT | Updated Aug 16, 2023 3:01 PM EDT
The weather history books have just been rewritten in Colorado.
An outburst of severe thunderstorms in eastern Colorado last week spawned an EF3 tornado near the town of Yuma, and AccuWeather Meteorologist and Storm Chaser Tony Laubach was live on the AccuWeather Network when one of the twisters touched down.
Not far away near Kirk, Colorado, another storm chaser came across a massive hailstone that was in contention for setting a new state record. A little more than a week has passed since the hail fell from the sky on Tuesday, Aug. 8, and climatologists have announced the preliminary results of their investigation.
"The storms on August 8th have preliminarily broken the Colorado largest hailstone diameter record," the National Weather Service (NWS) said.
On the day that the hailstorm occurred, a storm chaser measured the ice with a digital caliper, a handheld tool that precisely measures objects to a fraction of an inch. The instrument displayed a reading of 5.25 inches.
The NWS instructed the chaser to put the hailstone in a bag and place it in a freezer until climatologists could take more measurements of the potentially record-breaking chunk of ice.
"The stone had melted sufficiently that it did not break the records for weight or circumference," the Colorado Climate Center posted on X. "But the well-documented measurement from the original photo will likely be the new state record for hail diameter at 5.25 [inches], pending approval from the State Climate Extremes Committee."
Previously, the state record for the largest diameter of a hailstone was 4.83 inches, measured in Bethune, Colorado, on Aug. 14, 2019.
The NWS in Boulder, Colorado, also confirmed to Denver7 that the number of reports of hailstones above 1 inch in diameter in the state this year is higher than any year since 2005, though more frequent storm chaser reports could account for part of the increase.
As large as the hailstone was that pelted eastern Colorado last week, it pales in comparison to the largest hailstones measured in the United States.
On April 28, 2021, a hailstone measuring roughly 6.4 inches across and weighing a staggering 1.26 pounds hammered Hondo, Texas, located 40 miles west of San Antonio. That hailstone wasn’t even enough to break the U.S. record, but it did set a new state record for the largest ever measured in Texas.
The record for the largest hailstone ever measured in the U.S. occurred on July 23, 2012, in Vivian, South Dakota, located in the south-central region of the state, where a piece of ice 8 inches across fell from an intense thunderstorm.
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