On This Date: America's Record-Largest Hail Fell In South Dakota
On July 23, 2010, 15 years ago today, a supercell thunderstorm spawned a brief tornado and an 85-mph wind gust near Vivian, South Dakota, about 30 miles south of the state capital, Pierre.
But it was the hail this supercell produced that etched this storm into U.S. history. One resident of Vivian saved several of the giant hailstones in a freezer after they pelted his property.
Meteorologists from the National Weather Service in Aberdeen, South Dakota, later visited the Vivian resident and measured the largest of these stones to be a whopping 8 inches in diameter and 1.9375 pounds, both new U.S. records, topping the previous record from Sept. 3, 1970, in Coffeyville, Kansas.
(WATCH: Flash Flood Floats New Mexico Business)
It's hard for a single photo to illustrate how mammoth this hail was. The Vivian hailstone was almost as wide as a typical ball your child might use on the playground and roughly as heavy as a hammer. Now picture those stones falling at speeds over 100 mph, and you might imagine the damage they caused.
The hail left large divots in grass and punched a hole through the deck of the Vivian home. And because the severe thunderstorm knocked out power at the home, the record hailstone melted somewhat between when it was first found and when the NWS meteorologists measured it.
The Vivian hailstone is also the heaviest on record in the Western Hemisphere, according to the World Meteorological Organization. The heaviest hailstone anywhere on Earth weighed 2.25 pounds in the Gopalganj district of Bangladesh on April 14, 1986.
Jonathan Erdman is a senior meteorologist at weather.com and has been covering national and international weather since 1996. Extreme and bizarre weather are his favorite topics. Reach out to him on Bluesky, X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook.
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