Short answers, pulled from the story.
On the 14th of April 1986, a single hailstone weighing 1.02 kilograms struck the Gopalganj District in Bangladesh, killing 92 people and leaving a legacy of terror that persists in local memory.
Hail begins as water droplets that rise into the freezing zone of a thunderstorm, where they become supercooled and freeze upon contact with condensation nuclei. The storm's updraft blows the forming hailstone upward through varying zones of humidity and supercooled water droplets, creating an onion-like structure with alternating layers of thick translucent ice and thin opaque white ice.
Hail is most common within continental interiors of the mid-latitudes, particularly in regions where mountains force horizontal winds upwards. Key hotspots include Hail Alley in North America, the Hailstorm Alley region of Alberta, central Argentina, and Kericho Kenya, which experiences hailstorms on average 50 days annually.
Modern radar scans many angles around a site to calculate the Vertically Integrated Liquid or VIL, which provides a relationship with hail size. A specific pattern known as the three-body scatter spike serves as a crucial clue, resulting from radar energy hitting hail and being deflected to the ground, then back to the hail, and finally to the radar.
Hailstorms cost the United States $46 billion in damage to cars, roofs, and crops in 2023 alone, according to the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety. Hail is one of the most significant thunderstorm hazards to aircraft and causes severe damage to automobiles, roofs, and crops such as wheat, corn, soybeans, and tobacco.
Updated versions of cloud seeding programs using silver iodide have been undertaken by 15 countries between 1965 and 2005 with mixed results. While the Soviet Union claimed a 70 to 98 percent reduction in crop damage, these effects have not been replicated in randomized trials conducted in the West.