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Spring storms in Texas can bring heavy rain, flash flooding, tornadoes — and hail. Sometimes the hail is pea-sized and harmless. Other times, it is large enough to smash windshields, shred roofs and leave homeowners facing thousands of dollars in repairs.
A record-setting hailstone found in the Texas Panhandle is now raising new questions about how large hail can get.
On June 2, 2024, Val Castor, a storm tracker at Channel 9 in Oklahoma City, was driving near Vigo Park, southeast of Amarillo, while chasing a massive storm.
"I had already seen one or two tornadoes with this storm," Castor said. "I was playing catch up just a little bit behind the wall cloud at this point, and I was in the hail."
The hail around him was already softball sized. Then Castor spotted something unusual in a roadside ditch.
"I noticed what looked like a big white one-gallon milk jug in the ditch," he said. "And I thought, is that hail? I thought, no, surely not. That's too big to be a hailstone."
But it was hail. Castor said the stone was partly buried in mud, and he had to pull it from the ditch. Without a tape measure, he compared it to a Monster Energy can.
"That thing was about the size and shape of an average-sized pineapple," he said. "That's how big it was."
NOAA's State Climate Extremes Committee recently confirmed the Vigo Park hailstone measured 7.1 inches in diameter, making it the largest hailstone ever recorded in Texas. It surpassed the previous Texas record, set by a roughly 6.5-inch hailstone found in Hondo in 2021.
The new record underscores a major weather risk in Texas: property damage. According to the Insurance Information Institute, Texas led the nation in 2025 with 902 major hail events, defined as hailstones one inch in diameter or larger. The U.S. recorded 5,432 such events that year.
The financial toll is also growing. State Farm reported it paid more than $5.6 billion in hail-related claims nationwide in 2025, with Texas leading all states at $1.4 billion.
"Hail is a major issue, and it's not just hitting Texas," said Keiana Holleman, a State Farm representative. "It's a national concern. Hailstorms are hitting often and doing damage."
Hail is especially difficult to predict and study because it can be extremely localized. One neighborhood can be pummeled while another just a few miles away sees only rain.
Cameron Nixon, a research scientist with the University of Oklahoma and the Storm Prediction Center, said hail remains less understood than other severe weather threats.
"Hail is, compared to tornadoes, very understudied," Nixon said.
Scientists do know the basic recipe. Hail forms when powerful thunderstorm updrafts lift water droplets into freezing layers of the atmosphere. The ice grows as it is suspended and recycled inside the storm. Eventually, the hailstone becomes too heavy for the updraft to support, and it falls.
"It's a process that occurs regardless of the temperature," Nixon said. "A lot of folks are really surprised when you have a 90-degree day, and you get ice falling from the sky."
A 2024 study published in npj Climate and Atmospheric Science found that hail and other severe convective storm losses in the U.S. have quintupled since 2008.
The study projected that smaller near-surface hail could become less frequent in a warming climate, while the largest hailstones could become more common because stronger updrafts can support larger stones before they fall.
Still, Nixon said scientists do not have a definitive answer for how large hail can ultimately get.
The U.S. record remains the Vivian, South Dakota, hailstone, which fell on July 23, 2010. The National Weather Service reported it measured 8 inches in diameter, 18.625 inches in circumference and weighed nearly two pounds.
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