When Val Castor pulled his car over on a rural road near Vigo Park in Swisher County, Texas, on June 2, 2024, he thought he was looking at a discarded gallon jug of milk lying in a roadside ditch. He was wrong. What Castor had stumbled upon was the largest hailstone ever recorded in the state of Texas — a jagged mass of ice measuring roughly 18 cm (7.1 inches) in diameter, nearly the size of a pineapple. “I didn’t have a tape measure, and about the only thing I had to compare it to was an empty Monster energy drink can,” Castor told NOAA. “I’ve seen lots of large hail in my 35 years of storm chasing, but this was by far the largest.”
The record was publicly confirmed only on April 30, 2026, after rigorous analysis by the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety (IBHS) using photogrammetry, AI-assisted measurement, and the original estimates from storm chasers. The three independent measurements — 18.4 cm (7.25 inches), 17.9 cm (7.06 inches), and 18.2 cm (7.16 inches) — converged on a conservative final figure of 18 cm (7.1 inches), eclipsing the previous Texas record of 16.5 cm (6.5 inches) set in Hondo in 2021. NOAA made it official.
That record, however, did not stand alone for long. Just days before NOAA’s announcement, on April 2, 2026, a devastating severe weather outbreak tore through the central United States. In Johnson County, Texas, a trained spotter measured a hailstone of 11.4 cm (4.5 inches) near Godley. Farther north in Missouri, a concentrated hail core battered Greene and Lawrence counties, with repeated measurements between 7.6 and 10.2 cm (3–4 inches). The Springfield–Branson National Airport sustained hail damage across its entire 13.4 km² (3,300 acres) property. Airport spokesperson Ren Bishop Lubbering confirmed that vehicles across the facility — rental fleets and privately owned cars alike — were damaged. At Dickerson Park Zoo in Springfield, hailstones up to 10.2 cm (4 inches) tore through animal enclosures, killing one animal and injuring another. Dozens of wind damage incidents, broken windows at a Missouri high school, and widespread structural impacts completed the picture of a historic storm system.
What is happening to hailstorms — and why is the ice getting bigger?
Researchers studying four decades of atmospheric data are reaching a disturbing conclusion: the conditions that produce giant hail are becoming more common across the central and eastern United States.
Brian Tang, a professor at the University at Albany who studies severe weather, has written about why hailstorms appear to be intensifying. His research team found that since 1979, the atmospheric conditions needed to create hail larger than golf balls have increased in frequency over large parts of the country. The mechanism is straightforward. As surface temperatures rise, more warm and humid air is available near the ground, giving thunderstorms a larger energy reservoir and more supercooled liquid water in which hailstones can grow. Simultaneously, earlier snowmelt in the mountains of western North America is creating more unstable air masses that drift east — bare ground absorbs heat faster than snow-covered ground, energizing the atmosphere above it.
The physics of hail formation compounds the effect. A hailstone begins as a tiny ice nucleus caught in the updraft of a severe thunderstorm. As it circulates through the storm, it collides with supercooled water droplets that freeze instantly on contact, adding layer after layer of ice — clear and cloudy in alternating bands, like tree rings. The largest hailstones come exclusively from supercells, rotating thunderstorms with updrafts powerful enough to suspend a growing stone for 10 to 15 minutes or longer before gravity wins. The April 28 outbreak across Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Missouri developed within exactly such an environment: high atmospheric instability paired with strong vertical wind shear.
There is a further and counterintuitive dynamic at work. As the atmosphere warms, the altitude at which water freezes rises higher. Small hailstones, which fall slowly, melt before they reach the ground. Large hailstones, which fall fast, do not. The net effect is a shift in the distribution: fewer small hailstones survive to the surface, while the giants come through intact and growing. The atmosphere is, in a sense, being filtered — and only the largest ice survives.
Every year, hail causes billions of dollars in damage to homes, vehicles, crops, and infrastructure across the United States. A baseball-sized hailstone strikes with the force of a major league fastball. Property damage escalates sharply once hail exceeds the size of a quarter, and insurance payouts for severe weather — most of it hail-related — have climbed steadily over recent decades.
Fire and Ice: The Biblical Echo
Hail, the seventh plague that God brought upon Egypt, was unnatural, a clear manifestation of Divine displeasure, and not an ordinary weather event. The Torah records it with a detail that stunned the medieval commentators: the hailstones contained fire burning within the ice, and neither element destroyed the other.
“And the LORD sent thunder and hail, and fire ran down to the earth; and the LORD rained hail upon the land of Egypt.” (Exodus 9:23)
Rashi, drawing on the Midrash, explains that this fire and ice coexisted in miraculous harmony — “a miracle within a miracle” — because both were in service of the divine will. The Israel Bible expands on this: the fire within the hail mirrors the very composition of shamayim (heaven), which the Sages derive from the Hebrew words aish (fire) and mayim (water) — the two opposites that came together in harmony to form the heavens themselves.
The Midrash Tanchuma, compiled around the fifth century CE, states explicitly: just as God struck the Egyptians with ten plagues, so will He strike the enemies of Israel at the time of the Redemption — but in far more powerful forms. Rabbi Bahya ben Asher, the 13th-century Spanish commentator, sharpened the point: in Egypt, God used only a fraction of His strength. At the time of the final Redemption, far more will be revealed.
Rabbi Shalom Berger, the spiritual leader of the Mishkoltz Hassidic community, teaches that the War of Gog u’Magog will not be a war of armies alone. Zechariah’s vision describes a conflict in which nature itself becomes a combatant — earthquakes, altered heavens, floods, and disease. “God will take an active role in the war,” Rabbi Berger has explained, “and thunder and lightning will announce His presence.”
The Psalmist wrote it plainly:
“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)
A storm chaser in Texas mistakes a record-breaking hailstone for a piece of garbage in a ditch. Scientists confirm that the atmospheric conditions for giant hail are accelerating. A zoo in Missouri buries one of its animals after ice the size of softballs falls from the sky. These are not metaphors. For those reading the Hebrew Bible with open eyes, they are also not surprises.