Shifting Hail Hazard Under Global Warming and Effects on Crop Hail Risk
Global warming shifts hail hazard poleward, raising risk for winter crops like wheat while reducing it for summer crops — with major implications for food security.
Hailstorms are one of the more destructive faces of extreme weather — capable of wiping out a harvest in minutes — yet how a warming climate will reshape their geography has remained poorly quantified.
Raupach et al. (2026) tackle this by applying three globally validated hail proxies — the Raupach, Eccel, and SHIP proxies — to an ensemble of eight CMIP6 climate models, producing the first comprehensive global picture of shifting hail-prone conditions under 2°C and 3°C of warming. The headline finding is not a simple increase or decrease in hail risk worldwide, but a poleward redistribution that scrambles the geography of agricultural exposure in ways that differ sharply depending on what you grow and where.
Key Findings
Hail hazard shifts poleward, not uniformly up or down
Under both 2°C and 3°C of warming, the ensemble projects a consistent poleward shift in hail-prone conditions — with decreases in the mid-latitudes and increases in colder, higher-latitude regions. Increases were projected across land areas in central-northern Asia, New Zealand, southeastern Australia, North America north of 50°N, the northwestern USA, the southern Pampas of South America, and areas around 60°N in Europe. Decreases were concentrated across coastal southeast Asia, northern Australia, southeast USA, Mexico, eastern South America, and most of Africa south of 15°N.
Three competing forces drive the changes
The projected shifts result from three offsetting thermodynamic effects: increased atmospheric instability (CAPE) favoring hail formation, increased melting of hailstones due to a warmer troposphere reducing surface hail frequency, and decreased vertical wind shear. Which effect dominates depends on the proxy — the pure instability–shear Eccel proxy projected strong increases in the tropics where instability rises, while the Raupach proxy, which accounts for melting-level height, projected decreases in the same regions. This disagreement signals high remaining uncertainty, particularly in the tropics.
Winter crops face more risk, summer crops less
Across 26 crop types with fixed exposure and vulnerability, hail risk was generally projected to increase for winter crops — wheat, barley, rye — and decrease for summer crops including maize, sorghum, and soybeans. In China, wheat risk increased while potatoes risk fell. In Europe and Western Asia, the largest increases were concentrated in a zonal band around 60°N, around the Alps, southeast of the Black Sea, and in southern Iran. In North America, barley and rye showed significant regional increases across central and eastern USA and Canada.
Poleward crop shifts may collide with poleward hail shifts
Under climate change, suitable growing regions for many crops are also expected to migrate poleward. The study flags a compounding risk: if crop regions shift into higher latitudes where hail hazard is simultaneously increasing, any yield gains from warming may be partially offset by greater hail exposure. For winter crops in particular, this interaction warrants serious attention from agricultural planners and insurers.
When Hail Follows the Crops
The geography of hail has never been static, but Raupach et al. show that warming is actively redrawing it in ways that cut across the optimistic narrative of poleward agricultural expansion. The same latitudes gaining farmable land are also gaining hail-prone days — and the crops best suited to cooler climates are precisely the ones facing higher risk. High uncertainty remains, especially in the tropics and in projections of hailstone severity rather than frequency, but the directional signal is clear enough to demand that hail hazard enter the conversation on food system resilience under climate change.
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