The hail in Texas was so big Tuesday that it required a new description

LUBBOCK, Tex. - A string of rotating thunderstorms developed across west Texas on Tuesday, dropping record-setting hail and prompting a novel warning message from the National Weather Service. Hail the size of DVDs bombarded communities to the northwest of Lubbock, shattering windshields, damaging structures and even leaving small craters in fields and farmland.

In an unusual turn of events, the biggest hail report, at nearly five inches in diameter, came from … me. I happened to be storm chasing and was stationed in the town of Pettit, Tex., about 40 miles northwest of Lubbock, where I encountered hail larger than grapefruits.

I had pre-chilled a mobile freezer down to 24.8 degrees Fahrenheit to preserve hailstones in the off chance that I happened upon something noteworthy. As luck would have it, I did.

My report prompted the Weather Service to issue a warning for hail five inches in diameter. Examination of a database of Weather Service warnings indicates that this was first such warning among the 122 Weather Forecast Offices serving the United States and its territories since at least 2010.

While Weather Service forecasts have highlighted the potential for hail this big in watches, I could find no record of warnings for DVD-sized hail.

A rare warning

On rare occasions, Weather Service meteorologists issue warnings for softball-sized or grapefruit-sized hail, which corresponds to hail that is four or 4.5 inches in diameter, respectively.

Five-inch hail is an option for forecasters to select in WarnGen, the program the Weather Service uses to construct and disseminate warnings, but no prior instance of such usage was found. In general, it’s difficult to confidently distinguish softball, grapefruit and larger hail on radar unless there are ground-based reports, which don’t typically come until after the fact.

Most of the time …

Reporting massive hail

Upon entering the storm, I had seen that hail as big as softballs was falling. An initial severe thunderstorm warning, issued at 5:26 p.m., warned of tennis-ball-size hail. The slow-moving storm was only moving east at 25 mph. At 6:08 p.m., the warning was extended east and three-inch hail was advertised.

That’s around the exact time that hail the size of baseballs and a few softballs began crashing to Earth in Pettit. Meteors of ice exploded into blurred shards as they shattered on the paved surface in front of me. I could tell a few were bigger than four inches across.

At 6:11 p.m., the hail slackened momentarily, so I donned a hard hat and sprinted outside to collect some stones before they melted. Some were the size of grapefruits. I emptied my hail freezer, which had been filled with tennis-ball-size hail from earlier, to make room for new samples that were much larger.

Then I dialed the Lubbock office to inform them of my discovery, and the warning was upgraded.

“Giant hail to 4.5 inches in diameter was reported near Pettit with this storm! THIS IS A DESTRUCTIVE STORM FOR LEVELLAND AND SMYER!” it read.

I ducked outside once again and found even bigger hailstones. Unfortunately, I couldn’t measure the hail at that moment because my calipers were buried in a crate. But I couldn’t risk leaving the hail outside the freezer for more than a few moments. Instead, I lined up two Hampton Inn room keys (3.375 inches in length), noted that the largest stone was a little more than 1.4 room key lengths, and calculated the maximum dimensions to be between 4.72 and 4.89 inches. I called the Weather Service again.

“Giant hail to 5 inches in diameter was reported,” came the next warning at 6:33 p.m. “HAZARD … DVD size hail and 60 mph wind gusts.”

Preserving stones for science

When large hail began to crash down yet again, I sought refuge in my vehicle once more. After the hail, I found several other stones between 4.5 and 4.7 inches in diameter that had been lying - and slowly melting - for nearly 20 minutes. I gingerly placed them into the freezer (which plugs into my vehicle’s cigarette outlet) and stored them at 12.2 degrees. Then I texted Ian Giammanco, lead scientist for the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety, that I had a “freezer full of hail.”

“Want it?” I asked. A few hours later, we met up and I turned over the stones. His group is working to scan them in three dimensions for research, as well as take detailed mass and diameter measurements.

He confirmed that one of the stones weighed a third of a pound, with a diameter of 4.63 inches.

That would make it a record for Hockley County, Tex., beating out the previous record of 4.5 inches from April 29, 2012. The same storm caused $25 million in damage and blasted a swath from Levelland to Ropesville with 95 mph winds. Archived storm reports indicate that, because of wind-driven hail, “the west-facing exterior of homes in these areas was completely shredded.”

A recipe for massive hail

The jumbo stone that I collected is still a far cry from the Texas state record hailstone, a “gargantuan” 6.4-inch monster that fell on Hondo, west of San Antonio, on April 28, 2021.

“In the springtime here, generally May, early June, we can get some pretty intense storms, supercell storms, and those can quite often produce some very large hail,” said Gary Skwira, a meteorologist at the Weather Service in Lubbock. “We get baseball- to softball-sized once or twice a year. It depends a bit on year to year.”

Because of Lubbock’s position in west Texas, and its elevation - roughly 3,200 feet - it takes a while for Gulf of Mexico moisture to arrive each spring. That delays the peak of hail season to mid- to late April.

“Our big thing is that we need to get the moisture back here to fuel storms,” Skwira explained. “Dallas and points east see the Gulf moisture come in a bit earlier. We’re often back here in the dry air. Once we do get the moisture back, we can get some pretty intense storms.”

Interestingly, Tuesday’s DVD-dropper was the second hailstorm to affect Hockley County, Tex., in under two hours. As it turns out, the first storm exhaled cool air, which actually helped build the second supercell through a chain-reaction process.

“We found in research that sig-severe hailstorms often form in the cool outflow behind a previous storm,” Cameron Nixon, an atmospheric scientist, posted on X on Monday.

Many parts of Texas were rocked by severe weather Tuesday. Violent storms that swept through both Dallas and Houston unleashed gusts over 70 mph and cut power to nearly 1.4 million customers at one point.