40 Fun Facts About Ice Storms

Sliced in half, a large hailstone shows rings of clear and cloudy ice much like which layered vegetable?

An onion is the usual comparison: each layer records a different part of the storm cloud. Cloudy rings froze fast and trapped air bubbles, while clear rings froze slowly enough for the air to escape.

Which odorless gas from generators and grills run indoors kills many people during ice storm power outages?

Carbon monoxide builds up when generators, barbecues and kerosene heaters burn fuel in closed rooms without enough oxygen. Poisonings rise after ice storms because the outages can last for weeks.

The 1998 ice storm crippled which Canadian food industry, the world's largest, by wrecking millions of trees?

Maple syrup comes from sugar bushes, stands of trees that the weight of ice tore apart in January 1998. Branches snapped by the million, and orchards in the same region suffered heavy losses too.

Which New England poet's 'Birches' imagines a boy swinging on trees that ice storms have bent to the ground?

Robert Frost published the poem in his 1916 collection Mountain Interval. Its speaker knows that ice did the bending, yet says he would rather believe a boy had been out swinging on the trees.

In medieval Europe, what did villagers sound during storms in the hope of driving hail away from their crops?

Church bells were rung, and cannons fired, in the belief that noise could break up a hailstorm. The idea lives on in the hail cannons some farms still fire at the sky, though no evidence shows they work.

The US National Weather Service calls a thunderstorm severe once its hail is at least as wide as which coin?

A quarter is one inch across, the size at which hail starts to do real damage. Until 2010 the bar was penny-sized hail, which set off so many warnings that the public began to ignore them.

What name do drivers give a thin, transparent coat of ice on a road that lets the pavement show through?

Black ice is not black at all: it is clear, so the dark road shows through and drivers often see nothing wrong until they are sliding. Rain-slick roads that freeze overnight are a common cause.

During an ice storm, which parts of a highway typically glaze over before the rest of the road surface?

Bridges lose heat from both sides, because cold air circulates under the deck as well as over it. Their pavement temperature therefore falls much faster than a road resting on solid ground.

In the Book of Exodus, a storm of hail and fire is the seventh plague sent upon which land?

Egypt was given a warning first: Moses told Pharaoh to bring people and livestock under shelter before the hail fell. Those who ignored it lost whatever they had left out in the fields.

Snow and ice storms in southern China in early 2008 stranded crowds of rail travellers heading home for which holiday?

Chinese New Year, the Spring Festival, fell on 7 February that year, just as millions left the cities for their family homes. As many as 800,000 people at a time were stranded at railway stations across the south, Guangzhou's among them.

Which Canadian province suffered most in the January 1998 ice storm, which left millions without electricity for weeks?

Quebec took the worst of it as about a thousand steel transmission towers buckled in chain reactions across the storm zone. Montreal was coated in twice the ice left by its last major ice storm, in 1961.

Which Canadian city had 300,000 customers without power days before Christmas 2013 after an ice storm?

Toronto was among the hardest-hit places as freezing rain brought branches down onto power lines across the city. Thousands of Ontario customers were still in the dark well after Christmas Day.

Hail forms inside which towering cloud type, the same one that produces thunder and lightning?

Cumulonimbus clouds reach so high that much of the cloud sits in air below freezing, however hot the day is at ground level. Hail can even land a couple of miles away from the storm that made it.

Road salt, spread to melt ice on winter streets, is mostly which compound, the same one in a kitchen shaker?

Sodium chloride lowers the freezing point of water, so ice melts at temperatures where it would otherwise stay solid. De-icing roads is one of the largest uses of the compound.

Freezing rain falls as liquid even though air at the ground is colder than which Fahrenheit freezing point of water?

32°F is the point at which water normally freezes, yet raindrops can stay liquid below it until they touch something. Each drop then freezes on contact, coating roads, branches and wires in ice.

In American usage, what are raindrops called when they refreeze into tiny ice pellets before reaching the ground?

Sleet bounces when it lands, which is how to tell it from the freezing rain of an ice storm. In Britain and Canada the word means a mix of rain and snow, so Canadian forecasters avoid it altogether.

What term describes raindrops in an ice storm that stay liquid below freezing until they strike a surface?

Supercooled water needs something to start ice crystals growing, and a branch, wire or windshield will do. The drops freeze on impact into a clear coat that thickens for as long as the rain keeps falling.

The stronger which feature of a thunderstorm, the larger the hailstones it can hold aloft before they fall?

Updraft winds in a big storm can blow upward at 110 mph, fast enough to hold heavy lumps of ice inside the cloud while they grow. A stone falls only when its weight finally beats the rising air.

Which country holds Roopkund, the Himalayan lake whose skeletons were long blamed on a ninth-century hailstorm?

India's 'Skeleton Lake' is ringed with human bones, rediscovered by a forest ranger in 1942. Later research showed the dead came from two separate events roughly a millennium apart, so one storm cannot explain them all.

Canada's response to the 1998 ice storm was its largest operational military deployment since which conflict?

The Korean War had ended 45 years earlier, and nothing since had put so many Canadian troops in the field: nearly 16,000 at the peak. They cleared roads, sheltered about 100,000 people and kept farms supplied with generators.

The Sperry-Piltz index rates ice storms by damage potential, much as the Enhanced Fujita scale rates which hazard?

Tornadoes get their EF number after the damage is surveyed, but the ice index is issued days ahead as a forecast of harm to power lines. An Oklahoma utility official devised it with a Tulsa forecaster in 2007.

Most US ice storms strike which region, although a 1994 storm glazed the country as far away as Mississippi?

The Northeast gets most of them, but the February 1994 storm did more than a billion dollars of damage across the South. Ice was reported doing harm in nine states.

Freezing rain most often arrives ahead of which advancing weather boundary, while cold air stays trapped at the ground?

A warm front pushes mild air up and over the shallow cold layer instead of sweeping it away. Snow melts in the mild air aloft, then the rain chills again as it falls through the cold air at the surface.

What do meteorologists call the upside-down arrangement behind freezing rain, with milder air sitting above colder air?

An inversion flips the usual rule that air gets colder with height. It is why aircraft caught in freezing rain have to climb to escape: the nearest air above freezing is overhead, not below.

Cold-air damming, a classic setup for ice storms in the US Southeast, pins cold air against which mountain range?

Appalachians and ocean form the two sides of the trap: cold air banks up against the eastern slopes and cannot escape. Forecasters call the pool of chill 'the wedge', and it can sit there for days.

After a January 2009 ice storm cut power to 500,000 homes, which state called up its entire Army National Guard?

Kentucky's governor ordered the largest Guard call-up in the state's history, and about 100,000 homes there stayed dark for more than a week. The same storm cut power to two million people across ten states.

Which director made the 1997 suburban drama The Ice Storm?

Ang Lee cast Kevin Kline, Joan Allen and Sigourney Weaver as restless parents, with Tobey Maguire, Christina Ricci and Elijah Wood among the children. James Schamus's script won the screenplay prize at Cannes.

The Ice Storm, the 1997 film of Rick Moody's novel about two Connecticut families, spans which 1973 holiday weekend?

Thanksgiving weekend brings the neighbours' affairs and secrets to a head on the Friday night, just as freezing rain cuts the power and delays the trains. The plot follows the Hood and Carver households.

Which Australian city was battered in April 1999 by a hailstorm that set a national record for insured losses?

Sydney's storm did about A$1.7 billion of insured damage, passing the Newcastle earthquake of 1989. Forecasters had judged the day's instability minor, and large April hail was almost unknown in the city.

A freak hailstorm on Easter Monday 1360 killed about a thousand English soldiers outside Chartres during which war?

The Hundred Years' War paused soon afterwards, because Edward III took the storm as a sign from God. He is said to have vowed to make peace, and the Treaty of Brétigny with France was agreed within weeks.

Which long-lived, rotating class of thunderstorm produces the largest hailstones of all?

Supercell storms can drop hail two to four inches across, stones that hit the ground at 44 to 72 mph. Weaker storms cannot keep ice aloft long enough for it to grow that big.

Soviet rockets and artillery shells seeded storm clouds with which chemical in a bid to stop hail ruining crops?

Silver iodide was fired into the clouds because its crystals are built much like ice, which helps water freeze onto them. Soviet officials claimed the method cut hail damage to crops by 70 to 98 percent.

What name do scientists give to hail-like chunks of ice, some weighing tens of kilograms, that fall from clear skies?

Megacryometeors match ordinary rainwater in composition, so they are not debris from space. One that fell in Brazil weighed more than 50 kilograms, and similar falls were reported before aircraft existed.

Which Alberta city, on the path of Hailstorm Alley, is regarded as the hailstorm capital of Canada?

Calgary lies in the zone where insurance companies have paid for cloud seeding since 1996, hoping to shrink hailstones before they fall. The method has never been statistically proven to work.

Kericho, a highland town near the equator with hail on about 50 days a year, lies in which African country?

Kenya's hail hot spot sits more than 2,000 metres up in tea country, high enough for storms to stay icy in the tropics. It is reputed to hold the world record for hail days in a single year.

The heaviest hailstones ever weighed, about a kilogram each, fell in 1986 on the Gopalganj district of which country?

Bangladesh recorded stones of 1.02 kilograms, heavier than the widest American hailstone on record. That one measured eight inches across yet weighed under 0.9 kilograms.

The widest hailstone ever recovered in the United States, eight inches across, fell at Vivian in which state?

South Dakota's stone weighed almost two pounds and beat the old width record of seven inches, set at Aurora, Nebraska, in 2003. Aurora's stone still holds the record for circumference.

Which state capital in North America's Hail Alley averages nine or ten hailstorms a season, the continent's most?

Cheyenne sits where Wyoming, Colorado and Nebraska meet, the heart of Hail Alley. High ground helps: the terrain pushes storms upward, and falling ice has less time to melt on its way down.

Which German-derived word names the soft, crumbly pellets that form when snowflakes pick up a coat of frozen droplets?

Graupel was once known to forecasters as soft hail, and it also goes by popcorn snow. Fresh layers of it slide easily, so a deep fall on a slope raises the risk of slab avalanches.

What nickname did the media give a Canadian region left without power for weeks by the 1998 ice storm?

Triangle of Darkness was the English version of the French 'triangle noir', drawn between Saint-Hyacinthe, Granby and Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu. Some customers in the storm zone waited a month for power.