Hail measured 2.75 inches across 1 mile south of Pawnee, Bee County, Texas, on October 28, 2026, and photos attached to the report show the windows broken out on all sides of a police vehicle. The Storm Prediction Center logged it as the largest hailstone of the day. At 2.75 inches the stone is roughly baseball-sized, well past the 1-inch line at which the weather service calls hail severe.
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A cruiser stripped of its glass is a vivid detail, but the record behind it is a single preliminary local report, and the log does not say whether the officer was inside or what the repair cost might be. The phrase “every window” rests on the remark’s phrase “on all sides,” which does not count panes.
The Pawnee report in the SPC log
The entry in the SPC storm reports page is time-stamped 0105 UTC, which converts to 8:05 p.m. Central Daylight Time on October 28. It reads 2.75 inches at 1 S Pawnee, with the remark “Photos show windows broken out on all sides of a police vehicle.” The log does not name the department, the make of the car or where it was at the time, so nothing in the entry indicates whether the vehicle was moving or parked. The size is recorded in hundredths of an inch, as 275, and the report counts as a measurement only to the extent that a reporter held a ruler to a stone or compared it with an object.
Pawnee sits in Bee County in South Texas, within the area that the National Weather Service office in Corpus Christi monitors. A second, smaller report sits next to it in the log: 1.75-inch hail 1 NNE of Pawnee at 0101 UTC, four minutes earlier. Two reports within a few miles and a few minutes of each other may point to a single storm dropping large stones along a narrow swath, though the log alone cannot show that.
Jourdanton and the rest of the day’s hail
The next largest stone in the log was 2.50 inches at Jourdanton in Atascosa County, logged at 2230 UTC with no remark attached. Jourdanton falls under the National Weather Service office in Austin/San Antonio rather than Corpus Christi, and it was reported some two and a half hours before Pawnee. The two biggest stones of the day thus came from different storms in different forecast areas, a quarter of an inch apart.
Large hail was not confined to South Texas. The same log lists 2.00-inch hail at Aviston, Illinois, 2.00-inch hail at Loogootee, Indiana, and 1.75-inch stones at Shoals, Indiana, and 3 NNW of Fairfield, Texas. The whole day’s tally stood at 62 hail reports alongside 4 tornado reports and 53 wind reports. Against that backdrop, Pawnee’s 2.75 inches is the top of a long list of reports rather than a lone outlier, and it is the largest of the day only by a quarter of an inch.
How hail of this size is classified
The weather service’s glossary defines hail as “irregular pellets or balls of ice more than 5 mm in diameter” that fall from a cumulonimbus cloud. Its severe weather definitions set the severe threshold at 1 inch, a quarter, and list a golf ball at 1.75 inches, a tennis ball at 2.50 and a baseball at 2.75.
On those comparisons, the Pawnee stone matched a baseball and the Jourdanton stone a tennis ball. The arithmetic shows how far past the threshold Pawnee ran. A stone 2.75 inches across has 2.75 times the diameter of a 1-inch stone and roughly 21 times the volume, since volume scales with the cube of the diameter. Stones of that bulk fall fast enough to dent body panels and break glass, so the shattered windows described in the Pawnee photographs are consistent with the size on the report, and nothing in the log suggests an unusual vehicle or an unusual circumstance.
The remark also fixes a limit on what the report proves. Windows broken out on all sides show that hail reached the car from more than one direction, or that the damage built up over the length of the storm’s passage, and the entry does not say which. It also offers no wind measurement for Pawnee, so the record cannot separate what the hail alone did from what any accompanying wind added.
What is still unconfirmed
The 2.75-inch figure is the reporter’s estimate or measurement, relayed into a preliminary database, and neither of the two forecast offices involved, Corpus Christi and Austin/San Antonio, had posted a public information statement or event page for October 28 in the versions of their front pages that could be retrieved for this article. The Corpus Christi page was dated October 26 and the Austin/San Antonio page carried a last map update of October 26, so neither snapshot could have included the event.
The log also leaves open how the report reached the Storm Prediction Center and whether the department that owns the vehicle has described the damage. The only document in hand is the SPC entry: 275, 1 S Pawnee, Bee County, with windows broken out on all sides of a police vehicle and Jourdanton’s 2.50 inches as the next largest report of the day.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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