If Hail Falls in the US, How Big Is It?
418,487 measured hail reports, 1955–2025: two-thirds of all stones are quarter-size or smaller, 99.3% of the record lands on thirteen named sizes, a tenth of counties catch 42% of the big hail — and one South Dakota county has taken golf-ball hail every single year since 1996, the only county in America with a perfect 30-year streak.
A record written in pocket change
Hail is the rare weather peril whose official record is written in the vocabulary of everyday objects. When a stone falls, a trained spotter or weather-service observer compares it to a coin or a ball — penny, quarter, golf ball, baseball — and that comparison, converted to inches, is what enters the national Storm Events database kept by NOAA. The record runs back to 1955: 420,025 reports, each with a date, a county, and a size. We analyzed the 418,487 county-level reports carrying a measured stone size across the 71 complete years, 1955–2025.
We deliberately counted size and place, not dollars. Damage figures in this database are unaudited estimates; a reported diameter is a measurement, made by the person holding the stone. And those measurements have a shape nobody would design on purpose.
The coin jar is the instrument
Reports at each named size, 1955–2025. Bar length is the count; 99.3% of all 418,487 reports land on these thirteen values.
Only 191 distinct diameter values appear in 71 years. Spotters do not report a continuum — they report the object in their hand, and sizes between the named objects barely exist in the record. One tell: baseball (2.75″) outnumbers the smaller tennis ball (2.50″), 8,067 to 5,428, because more Americans can picture a baseball. The median stone in the whole record is exactly one inch — quarter size — and two-thirds of everything ever reported is that size or smaller. Six-inch stones? Forty-one reports in 71 years: somewhere in America, about once every two years.
The Plains don’t just get more hail — they get bigger hail
The state ranking surprises nobody: Texas (54,760 reports), Kansas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Missouri — five states holding 40.7% of the national record. The sharper finding is what happens within the severe reports. Among the 32 states with at least a thousand severe (≥ 1 inch) reports since 1996, the fraction that reach two inches — hen-egg size, the territory where things break — runs from 15.2% in Texas down to 4.2% in Pennsylvania. A severe-hail day east of the Appalachians is overwhelmingly a quarter-to-golf-ball day. The same day in the southern Plains carries several times the chance of stones that total roofs and cars.
Of every 100 severe-hail reports, how many are 2-inch or larger?
Top four and bottom five of the 32 states with ≥ 1,000 severe reports, 1996–2025.
Big hail also concentrates by county: 2,404 of the 3,147 counties reporting since 1996 have at least one two-inch report, but the top tenth of those counties hold 42% of all 20,642 such reports. Plotted at their own coordinates, the two-inch reports draw the country’s outline themselves — densest down the High Plains from the Dakotas through eastern Colorado into the Texas Panhandle.
Two months carry 45% of everything
Share of all reports by month, 1955–2025. May and June highlighted.
The season marches north. The peak month is May in Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Georgia, and Florida, but June in Nebraska, Colorado, and Minnesota — a season that begins on the Gulf Coast plains in March ends on the northern High Plains in August. And counted as national hail days, hail is nearly a daily event: hail an inch or larger fell somewhere in the country on 220 days a year on average (never fewer than 192, never more than 250, 2010–2025). What varies isn’t whether — it’s where.
The county where it never misses
Raw report counts inflate wherever observers are dense — the county-level leaders include Rapid City’s, Fort Worth’s, and Colorado Springs’s home counties. So for return frequency we used a deliberately blunt statistic: for each county and each of the 30 years 1996–2025, did it record at least one golf-ball (≥ 1.75″) report that year? One report or thirty, the year counts once — which strips out most of what a city’s worth of extra eyeballs contributes.
Thirty years, one perfect streak
The 2,933 counties with any golf-ball report, by how many of the 30 years 1996–2025 they had one.
The median county with any golf-ball history has it in 8 of 30 years. Nine counties reached 29 of 30 — Cherry and Lincoln in Nebraska; El Paso, Kit Carson, Weld, and Logan in Colorado; Pennington in South Dakota; Laramie in Wyoming; Gray in Texas. And exactly one county in the United States scored 30 of 30: Meade County, South Dakota, on the plains east of the Black Hills. The streak is real, not an artifact of where the window starts — Meade missed 1995, so 1996 is where the run genuinely begins. Together, the perfect-streak county and its runners-up trace a single corridor down the High Plains — the same corridor the dot map draws, recovered by a statistic built to ignore how many people were watching.
What this counts, and what it doesn’t
The headline’s question is only half a joke. A hail report requires a person: a stone that falls on empty range enters no database, so this record counts observed hail, and counts of reports mix meteorology with the density of people available to do the observing. That is exactly why the streak statistic above scores a county-year once no matter how many reports it produced — and it is why we make no claim that report counts measure a trend in hail itself.
The record also carries a rule change in plain sight. On January 5, 2010, the National Weather Service raised the severe-hail criterion from ¾ inch to 1 inch — and reports under an inch fell from 52% of the record in the 2000s to 26% in the 2010s and 17% in the 2020s. Sub-severe stones did not stop falling; offices largely stopped logging them. Every trend-shaped statement on this page is therefore made at one inch or above, where the criterion never moved. We show the discontinuity rather than smooth it.
Two more honesty notes. Counties are not equal areas — Cherry County, Nebraska is bigger than Connecticut, and part of its 29-of-30 streak is the size of the target. And a report is not a swath: nothing here measures a hailstorm’s footprint or what it hit — only that a stone of a reported size was seen at a place and time. The record’s one entry larger than the verified 8-inch national record (Vivian, South Dakota, 2010) is a 9.99-inch report from Indiana in 1961 with no narrative and no corroboration; we disclose it rather than delete it, and treat Vivian as the ceiling.
Reproducibility
Every number on this page comes from the results.json file in the where-hail-falls workspace, and a checker script re-derives all 76 quoted figures independently of the analysis code — 76 of 76 pass. Pipeline: the NCEI Storm Events hail record is read from the TerraPulse hail dex (420,025 slots, 1955–2026); the analysis set keeps county-level reports with a positive measured size in complete years (418,487); county-grain statistics use the full record, point-grain and repeat-strike statistics use the coordinate-complete era 1996–2025. Every result is a count over measured reports. No model, forecast, or interpolated value is used anywhere.
TerraPulse Data Lab, 2026-09-02. Data: NOAA/NCEI Storm Events database (US government work, public domain). Severe-hail criterion history: National Weather Service. Hail days are UTC days. All times UTC.
Published paper
The full scientific paper, with methods, tables, and references.