‘Monster’-sized hailstone could shatter Texas record, near world record

VIGO PARK, Texas – A hailstone the size of a pineapple could set a new Texas record.

A storm tracker for an Oklahoma City TV station found the hailstone near Vigo Park. He told Phys.Org that this was the largest hailstone he had seen in his 30 years of chasing. He saw the monster stone from 100 yards away. 

And this was a literal monster. The storm tracker used a 16-ounce Monster Energy Drink can to show the size of the hail stone in his social media posts. The stone dwarfs it. The can is 6.2 inches high, according to the company.

The tracker sent the pictures to the National Weather Service office in Lubbock, Texas, which shared them with the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety, a research group.

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“The group found the hailstone to measure just over 7 inches in diameter, which would shatter the current state record of 6.416 inches from Hondo, Texas,” the NWS released in a statement.

The Hondo stone fell in 2021. The photo below illustrates why it takes days or longer to verify a hail stone’s measurement into the record books. In May 2021, staff from the NWS Austin-San Antonio office and the Insurance Institute of Business and Home Safety met up at the hailstone’s finder’s home to scan and analyze the hailstone.

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Finally in June, the State Climate Extremes Committee verified and validated the hailstone, making it the largest in Texas – which is saying a lot for a state known for supersizing. The committee is made up of staff from the NWS and the National Centers for Environmental Information.

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“After reviewing the observational and meteorological evidence, the means and method of measurement, and previously documented stones, the SCEC unanimously agreed that the hailstone retrieved near Hondo on 28 April 2021 would set the inaugural SCEC record for the State of Texas in four metrics,” stated the SCEC memorandum.

Next, the Texas State Climatologist will verify the measurements and research the event.

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File: Matt Zavadsky of MedStar, ambulance service, shows hail damage on a response vehicle at their main office on Thursday, March 17, 2016 in Fort Worth, Texas.

(Khampha Bouaphanh/Fort Worth Star-Telegram/Tribune News Service)

Stone would need over 100 mph updraft

The size of a hailstone is directly related to the strength of the updrafts in a thunderstorm. The more time hail spends in a cloud, the more layers of water will freeze on it and the larger it will be. 

When the ice is too heavy for the updraft, a column of air flowing upwards in a thunderstorm, gravity takes over, and it falls to the ground.  Even just a hailstone of 4.5 inches needs at least 100 mph of updraft. 

“The extreme lift with the storm’s updraft was able to generate giant hail in the vicinity of Vigo Park,” NWS Lubbock said. “In addition, the storm produced a tornado which traveled over open country after passing the community.”

There is no word yet on how heavy the Vigo Park hailstone was, but the Hondo stone was about 1.2 pounds. 

A forecaster with the NWS told a local paper that the Vigo Park stone was about one inch short of setting a world record.

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The largest hailstone ever reported in the country fell in Vivian, South Dakota, on July 23, 2010.

(NWS / FOX Weather)

The largest hailstone recorded in the U.S. was 8 inches in diameter and 18.62 inches in circumference, found in Vivian, South Dakota, in 2010. It weighed 1.9 pounds. For comparison, a volleyball is also about 8 inches in diameter. In second place comes a Nebraska hailstone at 7 inches in diameter, but it did have a bigger circumference than the Vivian stone.

The NWS said that the record holding hail did melt a little before the official NWS measurement because the power was out to the finder’s freezer.

The heaviest hailstones on record fell in Bangladesh and weighed about 2.25 pounds in 1986, according to Guinness World Records. The storm reportedly killed 92 people.