How many of you have experienced the different sounds that hail makes on different objects and building material? Its not often that you can experience this in a single severe storm. The spectacular thunderstorm/storms that moved over Melbourne on Friday night was such an experience. At first these storms looked like good rather high-based end-of-the-day type stuff with nice photogenic rain shafts, some were backlit by the setting sun, all were remarkably slow moving, also absent was any appreciable shear! After 7pm the mid levels were by now very nicely primed and explosive.

The Melbourne hail storm evolved near to the back end of a weakening cell that had edged slowly towards the CBD at around 7.05pm, the intensifying updraft was hidden by falling rain encroaching onto the city, after about 10 minutes of moderate rain with very large drops (each drop would probably have put 0.2mm into the gauge) there came a barrage of smaller than pea sized hail, the sound, like small metallic pings..after a few minutes the sound changed to a slightly louder, but with a distinctive increase in the bass level, almost as if someone had turned down the treble and increased the bass control - this was associated with larger than pea sized hail. The tempo then suddenly slowed the beat halved as larger and less in number 1cm to 2 cm hail started to make  very noticeable bangs (this symphony of sounds was occurring on the large corrugated roof area of Flinders street railway station..) and then the 1812 Overture started ...as the hail fall rate slowed again far less but larger stones pelted the tin roofs with a sound I can only describe as like a 21 gun cannon salute these larger stones sounded incredible, some were shattering making a sound not unlike a cymbal being hit, others bounced and made progressively less noise as they skipped across the roofs..and then silence for a few minutes then back into a thin metallic sound of small hail.....

A few minutes later the main updraft core move directly over the CBD of Melbourne complete with infeed band and a slowly rotating high based wall cloud fronted by a magnificent orange glowing hail and rain shaft.... all this without any significant shear!!................

P.S. I can only just imagine what the Sydney hail storm would have sounded like with up to 10cm hail!!,  the largest measured hail in Melbourne on Friday was 4.2cm........