On April 12, 2016, a supercell parked over San Antonio and dropped hailstones the size of baseballs across the city’s north side. Insured losses topped $1.36 billion, making it one of the costliest hailstorms in Texas history. That storm hit during a fading El Niño, a detail that might seem like trivia until you look at what six decades of federal weather records say about the connection between Pacific Ocean temperature cycles and hail across the central United States.
As of spring 2026, NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center is monitoring the tropical Pacific for signs of the next El Niño development. For Texas property owners, farmers, and insurers, the question is straightforward: does El Niño actually change how much hail the state gets? The short answer, backed by peer-reviewed research and millions of storm reports, is yes. But the details matter more than the headline.
The federal data behind the pattern
Two federal datasets form the backbone of any serious look at this question. NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information maintains the Storm Events Database, a catalog of severe weather reports stretching back to 1955 for hail. Each entry logs location, date, hail diameter, and damage estimates. Early records, covering 1955 through 1992, were digitized from typed publications by the Storm Prediction Center. Post-1993 entries follow updated digital collection standards. The result is a continuous but methodologically uneven record spanning roughly 70 years.
To sort those hail seasons by climate phase, researchers turn to the Oceanic Niño Index, maintained by NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center. The ONI classifies each overlapping three-month period as El Niño, La Niña, or neutral based on sea-surface temperature anomalies in the central Pacific. That classification lets analysts tag every Texas hail season by its ENSO phase and then compare storm counts across categories.
A 2015 study published in Nature Geoscience by Allen, Tippett, and Sobel brought those two datasets together at the national scale. Their analysis found that El Niño conditions are associated with fewer severe hail events across the central United States, while La Niña years tend to produce more. Critically, the researchers also found predictive value: winter ENSO conditions offered a useful signal for early-spring hail activity, giving forecasters and planners months of lead time before peak storm season.
Why the Texas picture is more complicated
A national-scale finding does not automatically apply evenly to every county between Amarillo and Brownsville. Texas spans multiple climate zones, from the humid Gulf Coast to the semi-arid High Plains, and the way El Niño reshapes the jet stream can shift storm tracks rather than simply erase them. A statewide average showing fewer hail reports during El Niño years can mask localized spikes along the southern Plains or the Interstate 35 corridor, where warm, moist Gulf air collides with dryline boundaries regardless of what the Pacific is doing.
Data quality complicates the picture further. The Storm Prediction Center’s storm reports archive documents known issues: UTC time windows that can shift an event’s apparent date, latitude-longitude rounding that nudges reports across county lines, and evolving criteria for what counts as “severe” hail. Researchers who treat the full 1955-to-present record as a single uniform series risk mistaking improvements in reporting density, especially after the spread of Doppler radar and smartphone-era storm spotting, for real changes in storm behavior.
No federal agency has published a Texas-specific breakdown of El Niño’s effect on hail at the metro-area level. The Allen et al. study operated at the national scale, and NOAA’s regional climate offices have not released granular post-2020 analyses tying recent El Niño episodes to hail counts in specific Texas corridors. That gap means anyone claiming to know exactly how the next El Niño will affect hail in, say, the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex is outrunning the available science.
What this means for insurance and agriculture
Texas consistently ranks among the top states for hail-related insurance claims. The Insurance Council of Texas has noted that hail and wind together account for the majority of homeowners’ claims in the state, and catastrophe modeling firms factor severe convective storms into their pricing models. Whether insurers explicitly incorporate ENSO phase into rate-setting is proprietary, but the underlying logic is clear: any variable that shifts the probability of widespread hail outbreaks has financial consequences for carriers and policyholders alike.
For agricultural producers, the stakes are equally concrete. “Every spring, we watch the Pacific before we watch the sky,” said Mark Welch, a Texas A&M AgriLife Extension grain marketing economist, describing how producers in the Panhandle factor seasonal climate signals into planting and insurance decisions. Texas cotton, wheat, and sorghum operations in the Panhandle and Rolling Plains sit squarely in the nation’s most hail-active zone. A seasonal outlook suggesting reduced hail probability during an El Niño spring could influence decisions about crop insurance levels, planting schedules, and whether to invest in hail netting for high-value crops. The USDA’s Risk Management Agency already uses historical weather data in its crop insurance actuarial tables, and ENSO-phase awareness adds another layer of context for producers weighing their exposure.
How to use ENSO data for the 2026 Texas storm season
The correlation between El Niño and reduced hail frequency across the central United States is real, peer-reviewed, and grounded in decades of federal storm records. Its limits are equally real. The effect is statistical, not deterministic. A single catastrophic supercell can still form during an El Niño spring and cause billions in damage, just as San Antonio learned in 2016. The Texas-specific picture is coarser than the national one, and the underlying data carries known quality shifts between collection eras.
For anyone making weather-dependent decisions heading into the 2026 storm season, the most defensible approach starts with checking the CPC’s monthly ENSO Diagnostic Discussion to see where the tropical Pacific stands. From there, comparing the current phase against local hail climatology in the Storm Events Database provides a grounded sense of what history suggests. That combination is strong enough to inform seasonal risk budgets and planning conversations. It is not precise enough to justify dropping hail coverage or skipping a roof inspection.
Six decades of Texas storm data tell a clear story: El Niño years bring fewer hail reports on average. Treating that pattern as a planning input, not a guarantee, is the most honest reading of what the records actually show.
More from Morning Overview
*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
