Still investigating the mid-summer 1897 hail outbreak in E France. Information is endless. 151 hail swaths and counting. I've also stumbled upon 4 tornadoes, many wind damage reports, endless lightning accidents and deaths. There was also flooding in S France with (I think 300+) of casualties.

An early compilation of French destructive tornadoes, shown in 1897 French news

This is the SP that produced the 1995 L'Orxa hailstorm. Developed in only 45 km/h 0-5.5 km wind shear, and producing 33 min of rain and hail up to 320 g in L'Orxa it's an example of low-shear supercells that are common in Spain, likely thanks to complicated topography. meteologix.com/es/satellite...

The frightful finale of the 1897 outbreak was on July 2, when three cells taking over each other or maybe a single cyclic supercell doing two jumps to the SE carved a path of colossal hail across at least three departments:

The places hit by large hail during the 1897 French supercell outbreak that I've mapped so far:

Still investigating the 1897 French great large hail outbreak. Four departments down. Unfortunately Puy-de-Dome's reporting quality is not holding up, but still one can get a good idea.

I've been looking a bit into the European large hail outbreak of around 30 June, 1897. Really impressive, raged across UK, France, Germany, Tunisia, and probably others. Seems bigger, better recorded that any Spanish hail outbreaks I've read of. This is the Puy-de-Dome department alone:

This is my first really successful public transport storm chase. Location is Letux, Spain. I nearly got hit by a supercell that produced very large hail earlier on. Instead I was hit by the flanking line gust front, grazed by the RFD and gifted with some stunning clouds.

It was also interesting to look at the seasonality of large hail. No big surprises, they happen mostly from May to September. Interestingly, the peak hail occurrence shifts gradually from June to September as hail size rises, which likely has to do with the more elevated Mediterranean temperature.

The damage scale was meant for this. For a long time I wanted to distill my extensive Spain large hail data into something more usable, using a record more continuous over the decades, province capitals only. Two years ago I would have never guessed how ghastly the 1890s, and how variable it's been.

Some stuff I've been working on. The first is a hail weight scale, based on hailstone weight reports in historic newspapers (the lowest weight for which certain types of damage is reported). It uses some 800 Spanish and 400 French hailstorms, and is best applied to Europe for pre-1980 times.

I've made this map with the age of Harrat Rahat volcanic cones based on their erosion degree. Purple (south) is older, red (north) is youngest. The volcanic range has the length of the Netherlands! And shows amazing age progression. #volcano

So to put it into a map, here is Spain's tornado distribution. Three tornado domains born out of two different seas and a complex topography of mountain ranges over the interior.

The summer "tornado alley" occurs over the mountain ranges in NE Spain, being possibly absent in valleys. Tornadoes are often associated to giant hail. Low population density, resilient stone houses, and topographic obstacles give these tornadoes little impact historically. Alcañiz july 2003 tor:

As someone in the autistic spectrum I've been lazy to start posting stuff after moving from nutjob country. Here it's something I did yesterday. It's a map of tornado activity in Spain, divided by month. Green is mar, apr, may; red is jun, jul, aug; purple is sept, oct, nov; and blue dec, jan, feb