So, last night it was pretty warm. We had the windows open while I was studying in the living room and around 9:30 or 9:45 I hear something outside that sounds like a low, prolonged thunder roll. We had a storm to the west of us most of the night, so I didn't think much of it. Problem was, this rolling kept getting louder and louder. After a few seconds, the dogs and I sat up and I tried to look outside to see what was going on. Dexter started going nuts. Suddenly it got *really* loud; it sounded like we had a stampede going through the roof of our house. I immediately ran to get Kellie. She was freaking out as much as I was. We were starting towards the basement when I looked outside (through the front window) and realized what was going on. There was so much lightening it looked like daylight out. In the lightening, you could see the hail falling. It looked like the sky was dumping baseballs on us. It was a blizzard of hail. The Subaru, parked in our driveway, had its car alarm going off...
At this point, realizing it wasn't a tornado, we calmed down a bit. The hail lasted about five minutes. Afterwards, we went outside to check the damage; it was pretty obvious that the Subaru got hit hard... here's a pic of the windshield:
The roof of the Subaru looks like someone took a hammer to it. I couldn't get any pictures of that as it was too dark. Here's a picture of the hail:
I talked with the neighbors this morning; their kid was running around their front yard last night picking up hail. She said they have a bucket of it in the freezer :) For a size comparison, they took some pictures of the hail next to a tennis ball and they're about the same size.
I checked out our roof from the inside last night and from the outside this morning: everything looked fine. I really hope there's no damage to the roof given how loud it got last night... I guess this is why we have insurance.
To see the radar images of this storm, go here.