Late July and August are as close to thunderstorm season as Maine gets, and with this fleeting time comes what is virtually our only chance to see hail. In most cases, the little ice balls from the sky have better manners than their often-oversized midwestern relatives, so when they do fall, it almost seems like kind of a treat, a rarity of nature like a rainbow.
 
Maine lacks the intense heat and humidity needed for really major thunderstorms, and those are the kind that produce hardball hail showers. Plains States residents often speak of hailstones the size of golf balls or baseballs that destroy crops, damage roofs, and smash car windshields. Mainers are more likely to see pea-sized pellets or smaller, summer’s version of sleet.

That’s not to say we don’t have our hailish moments. “In the summer of 1995, 2.5-inch hail occurred near Springfield, east of Lincoln,” notes John Jensenius, the warning coordinator meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Gray. That storm stripped trees of leaves, dented cars, broke windows, and damaged roofs. Hailstorms of that intensity happen in Maine only once every five years or so, Jensenius estimates.

Hail is created when water droplets get bounced around inside a thunderstorm. The updrafts that create towering thunderheads lift the drops high enough to freeze in the upper atmosphere. The ice pellets fall, acquire more water inside the cloud, and then are lofted upward to freeze again. The cycle repeats itself until the hailstone is heavy enough to fall to earth, and it explains hail’s onionlike layered interior. Thunderstorms occur on ten to twenty days a year across most of Maine, although the western mountains and foothills can see up to thirty. “Hail is less frequent than that,” Jensenius notes. “It usually occurs only in the more organized thunderstorms.”

Jensenius says Mainers are more likely to be struck by lightning than battered by hail. It’s noisy when it happens and disconcerting for motorists, but by and large kids love it. In other words, summer hail in Maine is just nature’s way of putting the icing on the cake.

(Published August 1997)