PKU scientists uncover climate impacts and future trends of hailstorms in China
A research team led by Professor Zhang Qinghong and Li Rumeng from the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at Peking University (PKU) School of Physics, has found that hailstorms in China have surged since the Industrial Revolution, likely due to human-driven climate warming. The study, published in Nature Communications in September 2025, combines historical records, meteorological data, and artificial intelligence to track long-term hailstorm trends.
Why it matters
Hail can fall fast and hit hard. Apart from smashing crops and damaging homes, it may even endanger lives. After 2024's record-breaking heat, more hailstorms have been reported around the world in 2025. Under this backdrop, scientists are trying to understand how extreme weather changes as the planet warms. Yet the lack of long-term hailstorm records has made this question hard to answer.
Key findings
By analyzing 2,890 years of historical hail damage records and data from over 2,000 weather stations across China, researchers identified the number of hailstorm days was constant before 1850, but increased significantly afterwards. Similarly, the global mean temperature changed only slightly before 1850, but increased by approximately 0.8 degrees between 1850 and 1948. By using a decomposition method to look at the correlation, the researchers found a high possibility that the rise in hailstorm days was driven by the increase in global temperature.
The study also found that natural climate variability, such as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, which is a slow, long-term shift in Pacific Ocean temperatures and winds, works together with human-driven warming to affect hailstorm activity.
Researchers further used a convolutional neural network (CNN) model, trained on historical records, to predict that hailstorm days will continue to rise in the 21st century, peaking around the 2070s.
Future implications
The work offers millennia-long evidence that human-driven warming is amplifying extreme weather. These findings could guide global efforts in risk assessment, climate adaptation, and resilience building for decades to come.