Giant, Destructive Hail Is Becoming More Common With Climate Change, Study Says
As the atmosphere warms, the potential for hail as large as a grapefruit is growing
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This spring, massive thunderstorms swept across the upper Midwest. Along with destructive winds and tornados, these storms brought record-sized hail. In Illinois, one meteorologist, Victor Gensini, found a 16-inch diameter hailstone that weighed over a pound.
“It didn’t just break the record, but it shattered the record,” Gensini, a meteorologist at Northern Illinois University told the Chicago Sun Times’ Kaitlin Washburn after a big storm in March. “We’ve never seen anything like this since we’ve been recording hail, which started in the mid-1950s.”
This continues a streak of state-record-setting hail. In Texas in 2024, for example, a storm produced a pineapple-sized hailstone. Now, a new study published in the journal Nature finds that these giant hailstones will become more common as the climate warms from human-caused carbon emissions. In models of predicted future warming, the researchers found that the frequency of hail larger than a marble will increase 47 percent by 2100 in a worst-case scenario. Even in a more optimistic model of future climate change, the potential for storms producing giant hail will rise 38 percent.
Quick fact: Record damages
- The most damaging hailstorm in United States history happened on October 5, 2010, in Phoenix, Arizona. Hailstones measuring up to 3 inches in diameter caused about $2.8 billion in damage.
Hail forms when strong winds related to intense storms lift moisture high enough into the atmosphere that the water vapor freezes. Then, the ice particles grow until they’re too heavy for the winds to keep aloft. Warmer air can hold more moisture, meaning there’s more raw material for storms to create hailstones; but milder temperatures also melt ice as it falls to the ground. As a result, weaker storms that produce smaller hailstones might see the hail that makes it to the ground reduced or disappear entirely. Only the strongest storms will make large hail that survives the fall.
“Large hailstones melt too, but they can still reach the ground as sizable chunks of ice,” says Qinghong Zhang, a meteorologist at Peking University and lead author of the new study, to Science News’ Yujia Huang. “Smaller hailstones are affected more. They may melt completely and turn into raindrops.”
The study also found that the potential for hail will increase at higher latitudes, like in Europe or the United States, and might actually decrease near the equator and in the tropics. This is in part because temperatures are expected to rise more precipitously at those high latitudes as the global climate warms.
To predict the size of future hail, the scientists created a computer simulation of hail growth inside clouds based on variables like temperature, wind and moisture content. Then, they tested their model on the conditions from 14,000 real hailstorms that struck between 2014 to 2021. Once they were satisfied that their model accurately recreated the hail that had fallen in the past, they set their sights on the future to arrive at their predictions of the future increase in giant hail.
After another streak of hailstorms last year, scientists in France determined if a destructive storm in Paris could be attributed to human-caused climate change. They found that severe hailstorms in France and Germany, which have similar weather patterns to the United States’ Upper Midwest region, are 30 percent more likely to occur now than before humans began burning fossil fuels and releasing carbon that warms the atmosphere.
“We can say with more confidence that when storms do occur, a warmer atmosphere can make them more intense and capable of producing larger hail,” Davide Faranda, a climatologist at the French National Center for Scientific Research, told Inside Climate News’ Bob Berwyn in March.
Hailstorms already cause about $10 billion dollars in damage each year in the United States, and building standards don’t always require designs that withstand hail, writes the AP’s Seth Borenstein. This gap is especially noteworthy as giant hail becomes more likely.
“But disaster losses are not driven by the peril alone,” Walker Ashley, an atmospheric scientist at Northern Illinois University who was not involved in the study, tells the AP. “Climate change may be increasing the potential for larger, more damaging hail in some regions, but the future loss signal will also depend heavily on where people build, what they build, how resilient those structures are, and how land use changes.”