AccuWeather's Tony Laubach is chasing severe weather and explains what different terminology for hail means in terms of size.
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00:00 AccuWeather meteorologist Tony Loback is watching for what could be a potentially
00:04 destructive storm. He's live in Missouri with more. Tony, I've heard there's been some huge hail your way.
00:10 Like this? This is a pretty good size hailstone and ice is slippery, folks. But yeah, we just
00:20 got out of a storm here. Once you see something kind of interesting here, notice you got the clear
00:24 edges of this hailstone here and then in the middle it's like another hailstone. So we actually had
00:29 probably what happened is the inner hailstone, which was probably originally something like this,
00:34 got suspended back up into the updraft and then you had more water freeze on it and it kind of
00:39 created this hailstone. And we're going to measure this for you here because I'm going to give you a
00:43 little lesson in hail right now. So right now we're roughly, let's call it what, about two
00:49 two and a half inches. This has melted a little bit just being in the car here. But technically
00:55 this would be tennis ball size. But if you notice it's very flat. So sometimes when you hear reports
01:00 of baseball-sized hail, tennis ball-sized hail, it doesn't necessarily mean it is actually like
01:05 a baseball. Sometimes you get this hail that's a little on the skinnier side like this and it
01:09 falls. Technically this will go into the books when we measured it originally at baseball size. So
01:14 you can pair that up to a lime. It's pretty big size here. We'll show you a little bit here because
01:19 I sent my trusty intern, Allie, out to go and fetch some of these hailstones before this storm
01:26 really got going on top of us. We actually went to the south of this storm. The hail, the larger hail,
01:31 fell up to the north. We have seen reports of hail up as big as four inches. So that is softball-sized
01:35 hail. We're in the vicinity of that. So after we get done with this report we're going to see if
01:39 we can't find any of those bigger stones. Again what we've seen right now is about 2.75 or baseball
01:44 size by technicality even though the hailstone itself was not actually the size of a baseball.
01:49 It was still pretty good as you saw here. We measured that here on air at 2.44 inches. And
01:54 again that had melted a little bit here in the car just in the time that we were waiting to go
01:58 on air. So again this storm, a destructive hail storm. There's not a ton of it in. We're kind of
02:03 in a yard here right now and there's scattered about. So this is not like a Colorado hailstorm
02:08 where we just have incredible amounts here. But this is one of the early storms. We've got several
02:12 that have fired here across extreme southeast Iowa and parts of northern Missouri right now.
02:17 So we've got those warnings again. We head up to softball-sized hail for these warnings.
02:21 Take these seriously. It only takes one hailstone going through your window to be a big deal here
02:25 folks. But we are dealing with the large hail. This I think might even be the appetizer. We may
02:30 be looking at additional storms that develop behind this along the cold front Justin. So it was kind
02:35 of a you know we saw Allie on her first hit about an hour ago with those dark skies. This is what
02:40 that storm ended up becoming. So again these are happening quick. When these storms go up Justin,
02:44 they're going to go up and they can produce some monster hail.