Historical hail cases in Finland : 1776–1910

Historical hail events were found by searching the archives of the Historical Newspaper Library of Finland. Altogether, 461 hail events came from 119 different newspapers from 1776 to 1910. Without any proper observation network during that era, historical newspapers are the only source of severe-weather events. The motivation for reporting such details was fear of survival over a long harsh winter and the hope of getting regional aid after crop damage. Areal, diurnal, seasonal, and size distributions were constructed from this historical hail dataset and compared to a dataset of severe hail from 1930 to 2006. These two datasets were similar, albeit with small differences. Combining both hail datasets (1776–1910 and 1930–2006) yields nearly 250 years of data, only missing the years 1911–1929. Seventy-six percent of all known hail sizes were severe (≥ 2 cm in diameter). Most hail occurred in the afternoon during June and July over western Finland. Two events are studied in more detail using reanalysis data: the most active hail season of 1896 and an extreme hailstorm of 19 July 1882.