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Football sized hail?

I'm so glad that that storm wasn't as powerful when it got to us. 18" diameter hail would have destroyed a lot of stuff.
 
zinfamous said:
Are we talking Football like world-type football, or American football?
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Does it matter if it is soc football (ie soccer or football), rugby football (ie rugby) or american football (ie football)? The in terms of ball-sized ice, the ice would all be roughly the same size and the ice would hurt like hell.
 
Yikes ... I saw some ginourmous hail on July 3 2003 (did 8K worth of damage to my car, and pretty much ruined all the roofs in the neighborhood where I lived at the time and shattered all my neighbors windows on his house.)
This was hail with about 2.5-3 inch diameter. I can't even imagine the destruction a 7+ inch diameter hailstone would make!!!
Hah, I found my post from 2003 asking for advice on which shop to go to.... http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=1098549&highlight=hail
 
TwiceOver said:
I'm so glad that that storm wasn't as powerful when it got to us. 18" diameter hail would have destroyed a lot of stuff.
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Yea no kidding, could you imagine if hail that big hit a large metro area? good god everybody would be getting new cars, roofs, skylights, rv's boats, dogs,
 
Since when is a 7" diameter the size of a football? (Soccer, American football, or rugby)
Or did you mean one of those little nerf footballs that are about the length of my hand?
 
DrPizza said:
Since when is a 7" diameter the size of a football? (Soccer, American football, or rugby)
Or did you mean one of those little nerf footballs that are about the length of my hand?
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_(ball):

Soccer ball (size 5): ~27.5" circumference = 8.75" diameter
Rugby ball: ~23.5" circumference at biggest = 7.5" for the largest diameter
American football: ~22" circumference at biggest = 7.0" for the largest diameter

I think 7" diameter is close enough to those ball sizes. I don't think it was intended to compare a roundish piece of hail to the length of a ball. The circumference at the ball's widest point seems more reasonable for a comparison.

That said, the article mentioned 4" for these hails, which is far from a football size. The ariticle also mentioned 7 feet for hail in Nebraska which clearly is false. So, it was a crappy article.
 
I think you're overlooking the length of a rugby and football. And, generally in this context, a discussion about size would refer more toward volume than the dimension in a single direction. Is a golf ball the same size as a tennis ball? Yes? No? Well, how about the statement "a golf ball is pretty close to the same size as a speck of sand." Their diameters differ by less than that 1.75" difference. (diameter of a golf ball is 1.68" iigc)

I'll only do the math for the soccer ball with an 8.75" diameter. That's conveniently 1 and 1/4 times the diameter of a soccer ball, thus the math is pretty trivial to do in the head. (5/4) The volume - the thing that really matters since density of ice is close enough to constant - is therefore 125/64 times the volume of these ice chunks. And, even those are pretty irregular with that diameter being taken at the greatest point. So, a soccer ball has more than twice the volume of one of those ice chunks.


So, you're saying "Well, this one has twice the volume as that one. So, let's call it 'pretty close.'"
 
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Now that I see what discussion the thread brought, I suppose I should have posted it on a math forum.

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