Why Are Pakistan’s Hailstones Getting So Big?

Photos of ice the size of small fruit keep landing on Pakistani phones, the latest from Swabi on 6 October. Scientists say a warming atmosphere can produce bigger hail, but with so few instruments, nobody can yet prove the stones are growing.

The morning the ice fell

The stones sat in a metal tin lid held up in a living room in Swabi, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and they looked less like hail than like something carved. Each was lumpy and scalloped, cloudy white in the middle and glassier at the edges. Together they filled the lid, and each was bigger than a thumb joint.

The photograph was taken at 7:12 a.m. on 6 October 2026 and shared on WhatsApp, as most evidence of Pakistan’s weather now is.

Hail in October is itself a surprise. In the plains of the Peshawar valley, hailstorms belong to spring, when the Himalayan foothills clash with warm, moist air. By autumn, the season is supposed to be dry and settled.

Are the stones really getting bigger?

Many people in Pakistan will say yes. Farmers, drivers and homeowners trade photos of ever larger stones, and each new storm seems to top the last.

But impressions are not measurements. No long, consistent record of hailstone size exists for Pakistan, so the claim that the stones are growing cannot yet be tested. Pakistan has little of the radar coverage and dense monitoring that let scientists in other countries track hail trends. What can be explained is why bigger stones are physically plausible.

Why a warming atmosphere can grow bigger hail

Start with how hail forms. A thunderstorm’s updraft lifts water droplets above the freezing level, where they turn to ice and grow as more supercooled water freezes on them. When the stone gets too heavy for the updraft to hold, it falls. The layered, lumpy surface in the photograph is the record of that journey: up, coated, tossed, coated again.

The key point is that a stronger updraft holds heavier stones for longer. A warmer, moister lower atmosphere gives storms more energy, which is where climate change enters. Research on hail in other regions points to a counterintuitive pattern. A warmer world may produce fewer hail days overall, because more ice melts as it falls through a deeper warm layer, while the storms that do produce hail can produce much larger stones.

A province already on edge

The Swabi photograph lands in a year that has already tested the district.

In May 2025, a storm system hit Punjab, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Islamabad. At least 19 people were killed and more than 90 injured across the country, and in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa hail and wind badly damaged crops and power lines. Swabi was among the worst-hit areas for the power network, with 30 feeders tripping there alone.

In 2026, forecasters repeatedly flagged the risk. A federal flood commission press release in April warned of hailstorms that could damage standing crops in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and upper Punjab, and a mid-September alert named Swabi among the districts expecting thundershowers with isolated hailstorm.

Then, in August, a cloudburst and flood struck Swabi itself. The provincial governor said afterwards that Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is facing severe impacts of unusual climatic changes, with its northern districts among the hardest hit.

Hail in October extends that run of surprises into a new season.

What the hail takes

Hail does not make the headlines that floods do, but it hits in a different way. A flood is a slow disaster with warnings, rescues and relief camps. Hail is over in minutes and leaves ruin that is easy to overlook: broken tin and fibreglass roofs, smashed solar panels, dented cars, shredded orchards and fields.

In Swabi, where much of the economy is agricultural, the cost depends on timing. Few smallholders have crop insurance, so a ten-minute storm can mean a year’s debt.

Solar panels add a new angle. Pakistan’s rooftop solar boom, driven by high electricity bills, has put thousands of fragile glass panels under the open sky.

The warning gap

The Pakistan Meteorological Department and the provincial disaster authority do issue hail warnings. Last October, for example, a PDMA advisory warned that heavy rain and hailstorm were very likely in parts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa from 2 to 7 October.

But a district-level advisory is not a street-level alert. A hailstorm may strike one village and spare the next. The real test of the warning system is whether the message reaches a farmer’s phone, in Pashto, before the sky darkens.

What scientists can and cannot say

No single storm can be blamed on climate change. Proving a link requires a formal attribution study comparing the event with what would be expected in a world without human-caused warming, and for hail that science is the least mature of all extreme weather. Hail is small-scale, short-lived and poorly recorded.

What experts can responsibly say is:

•A warmer atmosphere holds more moisture and can fuel stronger storms.

•Larger hail is consistent with that physics.

•Pakistan is heating up and already suffering other extremes, from floods to heatwaves.

•The data needed to measure a hail trend is largely missing.

The stones in the tin

Back in the living room, the hail in the tin lid is already melting. By lunchtime it will be water, and the only proof will be a few photographs, passed from phone to phone.

That is both the weakness and the promise of this story. Pakistan lacks the instruments to count its hailstones, but its people are recording the climate anyway, one tin lid at a time. Photos like this one, with a timestamp and a location, are the raw material scientists will need if they are ever to answer the question in the headline.

The country contributes only a sliver of the world’s emissions, yet it keeps receiving the consequences, in forms that arrive faster than the science can explain them. Are Pakistan’s hailstones getting bigger? The honest answer, for now, is: a warmer atmosphere makes it more likely, and we don’t yet have the data to say how much.