When the National Weather Service receives reports of weather, they often turn those around to the public in the form of a product called a "Local Storm Report" (LSR). With a couple of hail reports over northeastern Iowa on Saturday evening and some more storms this morning over eastern Nebraska, it is a good time to check on how frequently such hail reports are sent out by the NWS. The featured chart presents the monthly total of LSRs sent by the NWS for locations in Iowa of hail at least one inch in diameter. There are a number of caveats to this chart, with the largest being a change in how the NWS issued and verified warnings with a transition to one inch hail being the threshold for warnings. That aside, the seasonal nature of such reports is readily obvious with May and June being the favored months. There are a handful of reports during the winter months, but those are rare due to the lack of strong instability to support powerful updrafts able to sustain and grow hail stones.

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Tags:   lsr