6-inch-wide hailstone falls in Texas storm

Everything’s bigger in Texas. Apparently that extends to hail, including one stone that may have been more than a half-foot wide.

It fell amid a barrage of prolific hailstorms that incurred potentially billions of dollars in damages across Fort Worth, Oklahoma City and areas west of San Antonio on Wednesday night.

Perhaps the most potent storm of the day blossomed over Coahuila, Mexico, during the midafternoon before drifting east into South Texas, where it dropped hail the size of grapefruits. While the largest official report stood at 4 inches, emerging evidence suggests some of the stones may break new state records.

One stone that landed in Hondo, about 30 miles west of San Antonio, may vie for a state record.

Matt Kumjian, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Penn State who specializes in the study of giant hail, used photogrammetry — a trigonometry-based approach of estimating the size of objects from photographs — to calculate just how large the stone may have been. His estimate? Between 6.27 and 6.57 inches across.

“The photograph contained a reference object (a U.S. quarter coin, which has a diameter of 24.26 mm),” explained Kumjian in an email. “The camera’s perspective was at an angle, so there is a slight skew in the dimensions of the quarter. As such, I used the two extreme measurements of the quarter as references.”

Six inches is a conservative estimate but would still set a new state record if confirmed. The current record is held by a stone that fell on May 20, 2019, in the Texas Panhandle town of Wellington. Similarly massive hail was measured in Smithville, about an hour southeast of Austin, on March 18, 2018.