Storm chasers find 'iPhone'-sized hailstone from Texas thunderstorm

04:04

Storm chaser finds mammoth 5.5-inch hail stone in Texas

Jana Houser and two others were chasing storms in Texas when they came upon a road littered with massive hailstones, including one she measured using her iPhone as a reference at 5.5 inches in diameter. 

LELA, Texas – You've heard of baseball- or golf ball-sized hail, or maybe even grapefruit-sized, but we're going to need a new entry on the size chart now:

"iPhone-sized" hail.

Ohio State University meteorology professor Jana Houser was out storm chasing with two partners looking for large hail from massive supercells roaming around Texas Tuesday and ended up finding one of the larger hailstones you'll see in a severe weather season.

Hail was estimated at 5.5 inches in diameter in Shamrock, Texas, on Tuesday, June 13, 2023.

(Jana Houser / Facebook / FOX Weather)

"We had just driven through half-dollar to golf ball (-sized hail) that were coming down like snow, reducing visibility to near zero at times on Texas Highway 273 between Pampa and McClean," Houser told FOX Weather. "We punched through the (hail) core from the north, just to the north of I-40. We were attempting to get east of the storm, but it was moving too fast, and we decided to stop our effort for the day."

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They exited Interstate 40 at Lela only to find several large hailstones scattered on the ground.

"We saw a decent number of stones ranging between 2 to 3 inches – many of which were shattered," she said. "As we looked a little more, we found a few that were about 4 inches, but then found this one."

She didn't have a ruler handy to measure the hailstone, but she did have her cell phone – a 2nd generation Apple iPhone SE.

"I used my iPhone SE as a ruler, which is 5.5 (inches long), and the stone was basically the same length," she said.

Five-and-a-half inches is about an inch larger in diameter than a grapefruit.

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But this "iPhone" stone might have been even larger.

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"The hail core had passed that location 5 to 10 minutes earlier, so it had already melted a bit too," she said.

It was a massive find in more ways than one, though still a far cry from the record. The largest hailstone recorded in the U.S. was 8 inches in diameter and 18.62 inches in circumference, found in Vivian, South Dakota, in 2010. It weighed nearly 2 pounds.

Stone likely fell at over 100 mph

The supercell responsible for the massive hailstone likely had updrafts that exceeded 100 mph. NOAA estimates such triple-digit wind speeds are needed to support a hailstone as large as 4.5 inches.

And when gravity wins the battle of keeping such large hailstones aloft? The frozen ice balls can fall at speeds of at least 75 mph, with some hailstones larger than 4 inches potentially reaching 100 mph while falling.