LUBBOCK, Texas – A series of rotating thunderstorms developed in West Texas on Tuesday, dumping unprecedented hail and prompting a novel warning message from the National Weather Service. DVD-sized hail bombarded communities northwest of Lubbock, shattering windshields, damaging structures and even leaving small craters in fields and farmland.
In an unusual turn of events, the report of the largest hail, nearly five inches in diameter, came from… me. I was chasing storms and was stationed in the town of Pettit, Texas, about 40 miles northwest of Lubbock, where I encountered hail larger than grapefruits.
I had pre-cooled a mobile freezer to 24.8 degrees Fahrenheit to preserve hail in case I ran into anything noteworthy. Luckily, I did.
My report led the Weather Service to issue a warning for hail five inches in diameter. Examination of a Weather Service warning database indicates that this was the 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 of this magnitude in alerts, I couldn’t find any records of DVD-sized hail warnings.
On rare occasions, Weather Service meteorologists issue warnings for baseball-sized or grapefruit-sized hail, which corresponds to hail four or 4.5 inches in diameter, respectively.
Five-inch hail is an option forecasters can select in WarnGen, the program the Weather Service uses to create and disseminate warnings, but no previous cases of such use were found. In general, it is difficult to reliably distinguish softball, grapefruit, and larger hail on radar unless there are ground reports, which typically don’t come until after the fact.
Going into the storm, I had seen hail the size of softballs falling. An initial severe thunderstorm warning, issued at 5:26 p.m., warned of tennis ball-sized hail. The slow-moving storm was only moving east at 25 mph. At 6:08 p.m., the warning was extended eastward and three-inch hail was announced.
That’s around the exact moment that hail the size of baseballs and a few softballs began crashing to Earth in Pettit. Ice meteors exploded into blurry fragments as they shattered on the paved surface in front of me. I noticed that some were more than four inches wide.
At 6:11 pm, the hail momentarily let up, so I put on a helmet and ran outside to pick up some rocks before they melted. Some were the size of grapefruits. I emptied my hail freezer, which had previously been full of tennis ball-sized hail, to make room for new samples that were much larger.
I then called the Lubbock office to inform them of my discovery and the warning was updated.
“With this storm, giant hail measuring 4.5 inches in diameter was reported near Pettit! THIS IS A DESTRUCTIVE STORM FOR LEVELLAND AND SMYER!” she read.
I ducked outside once more and found even bigger hail. Unfortunately I couldn’t measure the hail at that time because my calipers were buried in a box. But I couldn’t risk leaving the hail out of the freezer for more than a few moments. Instead, I lined up two Hampton Inn room keys (3.375 inches long), noted that the largest stone was a little over 1.4 room key lengths, and estimated the maximum dimensions to be between 4.72 and 4 .89 inches. I called the Weather Service again.
“Giant hail up to 5 inches in diameter was reported,” the next warning came at 6:33 p.m. “DANGER…DVD-sized hail and wind gusts to 60 mph.”
Preserving stones for science
When large hail fell again, I sought refuge in my vehicle once again. After the hail, I found several other stones between 4.5 and 4.7 inches in diameter that had been lying around (and slowly melting) for almost 20 minutes. I cautiously placed them in the freezer (which plugs into my vehicle’s cigarette outlet) and stored them at 12.2 degrees. Then I texted Ian Giammanco, senior scientist at the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Security, telling him he had a “freezer full of hail.”
“I love you?” I asked. A few hours later we met and I turned over the stones. His group is working to scan them in three dimensions for research purposes, as well as to take detailed measurements of mass and diameter.
He confirmed that one of the stones weighed a third of a pound and had a diameter of 4.63 inches.
That would make it a record for Hockley County, Texas, surpassing the previous record of 4.5 inches from April 29, 2012. The same storm caused $25 million in damage and leveled a swath from Levelland to Ropesville with 95 mph winds. Archived storm reports indicate that due to wind-driven hail, “the exterior of west-facing homes in these areas were completely destroyed.”
A recipe for massive hail
The giant rock I picked up is still a far cry from the Texas state record hail, a “gigantic” 6.4-inch monster that fell on Hondo, west of San Antonio, on April 28, 2021.
“In the spring here, usually in May or early June, we can have pretty intense storms, supercell storms, that can often produce very large hail,” said Gary Skwira, a meteorologist with the Weather Service in Lubbock. “We have baseball the size of once or twice a year. “It depends a little from year to year.”
Due to Lubbock’s position in West Texas and its elevation (approximately 3,200 feet), it takes a while for moisture from the Gulf of Mexico to arrive each spring. That delays the peak of the hail season until mid-to-late April.
“The most important thing is that we need to get the moisture back here to feed the storms,” Skwira explained. “Dallas and points east see Gulf moisture arriving a little earlier. We often encounter dry air here. “Once we get the moisture back, we could see some pretty intense storms.”
Interestingly, Tuesday’s DVD drop was the second hail storm to hit Hockley County, Texas, in less than two hours. It turns out that the first storm blew out cold air, which actually helped build the second supercell through a chain reaction process.
“In research we found that very severe hail storms often form in the cold flow behind a previous storm,” Cameron Nixon, an atmospheric scientist, posted in X on Monday.
Many parts of Texas were hit by severe weather on Tuesday. The violent storms that hit Dallas and Houston brought gusts of more than 70 mph and knocked out power to nearly 1.4 million customers at one point.
Keynote USA
For the Latest Local News, Follow @Keynote USA Local on Twitter.