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Why would producing many small hailstones reduce damage compared with producing fewer large hailstones?
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weather modification
Cloud seeding can produce an extra 5 to 15% of precipitation.
The goal of hail-suppression efforts is to reduce the damage caused by hailstones by decreasing their size. This strategy relies on the principle that a fixed amount of supercooled water within a cloud can be distributed among a larger number of ice nuclei.1
If ice-nuclei seeding is used to increase the number of hailstones produced from the same volume of supercooled water, the individual mass of each stone is significantly reduced. Smaller hailstones are less destructive for two primary reasons:1
- Melting: As they fall through the warmer air layer below the freezing level, smaller stones are more likely to melt completely or significantly decrease in size before reaching the ground.1
- Impact Force: Even if they do not melt entirely, smaller hailstones possess lower terminal velocities and less mass, making them incapable of causing the severe damage associated with larger, denser ice pellets.12
By converting a few large, damaging stones into many smaller, less harmful ones, the overall impact on agriculture and property can be mitigated.1