Weather Warning Issued As 'Baseball Size' Hail Hits State

Meteorologists are warning of hazardous weather for parts of Kansas as thunderstorms bring the threat of large hail into Thursday.

The National Weather Service (NWS) issued the alert for central, southern and southeastern areas of the state due to the risk of the "severe" storms creating dime- to quarter-sized hail, along with winds gusting up to 60 miles an hour.

However, residents posting images of the hail that fell near them suggested the hail may have been larger in places.

Gary Lezak, a former local meteorologist in Kansas City, Missouri, said a friend of his based in Shawnee, Kansas, had sent him an image of hail that was "near baseball size."

"I asked him to cut the hailstone in half," he added, referencing one which showed several rings of ice. "Look at the layers in the one cut in half. It went up and down violently inside that thunderstorm several times!"

Patti Gray Ritchie, another Shawnee resident, posted a picture showing hail alongside a golf ball, with one being slightly larger than the ball. Kylie Hicken responded that the precipitation was so fierce she "thought my car windows were going to break!"

Meanwhile, Nick Bender, a meteorologist for local channel KMBC, posted several images of hail from Edwardsville near the border with Missouri, one purporting to show "baseball to nearly softball size" pellets and another "tennis ball-sized."

The large hail appears to have also spread into Missouri. Mason McCall, a local photographer, displayed several images of "quarter- [to] half dollar-sized" hail to the west of Liberty, a northwesterly suburb of Kansas City.

The NWS says that hail an inch or greater in diameter is considered severe. A quarter is roughly an inch across, while a baseball has a diameter of up to 2.94 inches.

The weather agency has confirmed hail of up to the size of a baseball in Kansas, and near the size of a golf ball (1.75 inches) in Missouri.

In its latest forecast, the NWS said that a low-pressure system from the central Plains into the Midwest would mix with warm, moist air from the Gulf of Mexico to create severe thunderstorms, which would push southwards from the eastern central Plains on Thursday morning, arriving in southeastern Texas by Saturday morning.

"Meanwhile, the low-pressure system will bring widespread rainfall across the southern half of the Great Lakes today, spreading into New England tonight into Friday," it added. "The rain will likely mix with wet snow across interior New England on Friday before the system steadily moves off the coast early on Saturday."

The front comes after a storm brought heavy snow to the Northeast over the weekend and into Monday, while chilly air from the Northwest brought another bout of lake-effect snow to areas downwind of the Great Lakes.