Hailstorms have been making headlines lately. Last week, a powerful out-of-season storm highlighted by heavy hail swept through Alexandria, Egypt, creating widespread flooding.
This was manifested last week when hurricane-force winds created blizzard conditions in Iceland’s northern fjords. This created a Level 3 severe weather outbreak that swept across Europe with destructive hail, damaging winds, flash floods, and potential tornadoes impacting multiple countries.
One day earlier, powerful storms swept through central France on June 3, 2025, bringing large hail and heavy rain to the Loire and Puy-de-Dôme regions of France.
At the same time, a powerful storm with tennis ball-sized hail struck Slovenia’s Gorička region, damaging homes, vehicles, and crops on June 3.
But hailstorms also hit in the US. Last Wednesday, a severe hailstorm struck Deaf Smith and Randall Counties, Texas, producing hail of tennis ball size, accompanied by heavy rainfall. This combination caused immediate physical damage to wheat crops and complicated field access for farmers. The storm’s timing, during the wheat growing season, amplified its impact on agricultural operations.
On Monday, gusts of up to 40 mph and pea-sized hail (0.25 inches), accentuated by severe thunder and lightning, hit areas in Southern Alabama.
This spate of hail may not be an anomaly. Each year, hail causes billions of dollars worth of damage to homes, vehicles, crops, and infrastructure in the United States. Brian Tang, a professor who studies weather at the University at Albany in New York, recently wrote in Scientific American about why hailstorms seem to be happening more often and getting more dangerous.
How Hail Forms
Hail starts as tiny pieces of ice that get caught up in a thunderstorm’s powerful upward winds. As these ice pieces move around in the storm, they bump into supercooled water—water that’s still liquid even though it’s colder than freezing. When this super-cold water touches the ice, it freezes instantly, making the hailstone bigger.
This freezing happens at different speeds depending on how cold the hailstone is, which creates layers of clear and cloudy ice. If you cut open a big hailstone, you can see these layers, just like the rings inside a tree trunk.
How big a hailstone gets depends on the path it takes through the storm cloud and how long it stays up there collecting more ice.
The biggest hail comes from special rotating thunderstorms called supercells. These powerful storms can keep hailstones floating in their strong updrafts for 10 to 15 minutes or even longer, giving them plenty of time to grow before they finally become too heavy and fall to the ground.
When Hail Happens Most
Hail is most common during spring and summer when several weather conditions come together: warm, humid air close to the ground, unstable air higher up, winds that change direction and speed at different heights, and thunderstorms triggered by weather systems moving through.
The Damage Gets Worse as Hail Gets Bigger
Hailstorms can be incredibly destructive, especially for farms where even small hail can destroy crops and damage fruit.
As hailstones get bigger, they become much more dangerous. A baseball-sized hailstone falling from the sky hits with as much force as a major league fastball. That’s why property damage to roofs, siding, windows, and cars increases dramatically once hail gets bigger than a quarter.
Insurance companies have paid out much more money for severe weather damage over the past few decades, and most of this is from hail. This increase is mainly because more people are living in areas where hail is common, meaning there’s more property that can be damaged, and it costs more to fix or replace things that hail destroys.
Is Climate Change Making Hailstorms Worse?
Tang and his research team studied 40 years of weather data and found that the atmospheric conditions needed to create very large hail—bigger than golf balls—have become more common in parts of the central and eastern United States since 1979. Other studies looking at storm formation and radar data have found smaller increases in large hail, mostly over the northern Plains.
There are two main reasons why “climate change” might be making the conditions for large hail more common:
First, as the Earth warms up, there’s more warm, humid air available. This gives thunderstorms more energy and creates more supercooled water for hail to grow in.
Second, there are more unstable air masses forming over the mountains of western North America and then moving east. As snow melts earlier in the year, these unstable air masses form more easily because the sun heats up the bare land faster—like turning up a stove burner—which then heats the air above it.
“Climate change” might also mean less small hail but more large hail. As the atmosphere warms, the level where water freezes moves higher up. Small hailstones would melt completely before hitting the ground, but larger hailstones fall faster and need more time to melt, so they’re less affected by this change.
The combination of better conditions for large hail and changes in the storms themselves might lead to even bigger hailstones in the future.
Visions of massive hailstorms seem to hint at the seventh plague that struck Egypt before the Exodus of the Hebrews. Jewish sources predict that all of the plagues will reappear in the final Redemption, but in even more powerful forms. It is written in Midrash Tanchuma, homiletic teachings collected around the fifth century, that “just as God struck the Egyptians with 10 plagues, so too He will strike the enemies of the Jewish people at the time of the Redemption.”
This concept was explained by Rabbi Bahya ben Asher, a 13th-century Spanish commentator, who wrote, “In Egypt, God used only part of His strength. When the final redemption comes, God will show much, much more of His power.”
The Israel Bible gives a poignant explanation of why the seventh plague, a combination of fire and ice, is appropriate for the turbulent times we live in.
“The hail contains both fire and ice, yet the fire does not melt the ice, and the water of the ice does not extinguish the fire. They are able to exist in harmony for the purpose of fulfilling God’s will. Similarly, the medieval commentator Rashi comments (Gen. 1:8) that the Hebrew word for heaven, ‘shamayim,’ comes from the Hebrew words ‘aish’ (fire) and ‘mayim’ (water), as the two came together in harmony to make up the heavens. This serves as a powerful lesson of peace and is referenced in the daily Jewish prayer service. The following supplication appears multiple times in the liturgy: ‘He Who makes peace in His heights (between fire and water), may He make peace, upon us and upon all Israel.’”
Rabbi Shalom Berger, the revered spiritual leader of thousands of Hassidic Jews belinging to the Mishkoltz sect of Judaism, taught that the War of Gog and Magog will include the forces of nature as well as soldiers of flesh and blood.
“Ezekiel describes a simple war of man-versus-man,” Rabbi Berger explained. “But it would be incorrect to envision Gog and Magog as a war. Zechariah describes a conflict in which nature plays an active role. Earthquakes wrack the land, the sun and the moon change, water flows in different manners, and disease will play a major role. God will take an active role in the war, and thunder and lightning will announce His presence.”
“ Hashem is king! Let the earth exult, the many islands rejoice! Dense clouds are around Him, righteousness and justice are the base of His throne. Fire is His vanguard, burning His foes on every side. His lightnings light up the world; the earth is convulsed at the sight;” – Psalms 97:1-4
“That is also part of the picture,” Rabbi Berger said. “The War of Gog and Magog begins outside of Israel, but its focus is on Jerusalem.”
