How bad does hail get in Cypress and Harris County, and how often?

Harris County recorded 143 hail events from 2016 through 2025 — about 14 a year — with 119 reaching the National Weather Service's 1-inch severe-hail threshold, per NOAA's Storm Events Database. Counts swing widely year to year, and Cypress took a direct hit from a derecho on May 16, 2024, with an EF-1 tornado and an estimated 104 mph gust.

Harris County recorded 143 hail events from 2016 through 2025 — an average of about 14 a year — with 119 of those meeting the National Weather Service’s 1-inch severe-hail threshold, according to NOAA’s Storm Events Database. Cypress itself took a direct hit on May 16, 2024, when a derecho produced an EF-1 tornado and an estimated 104 mph wind gust in the area. Year-to-year hail counts swing dramatically, from zero recorded events in 2022 to 28 in both 2023 and 2024.

How often does Harris County get hail?

NOAA’s Storm Events Database recorded 143 hail events across Harris County from 2016 through 2025 — an average of about 14 per year — with 119 of those reaching or exceeding the 1.00-inch severe-hail threshold the National Weather Service uses to classify a storm as severe.

That works out to roughly 14 recorded hail events a year on average, but these are point reports of individual storm events, not distinct storm days — a single storm system can generate several separate hail reports across the county, so the total shouldn’t be read as a “hail days per year” figure. The county also logged 176 separate thunderstorm-wind events over the same 2016–2025 span; hail and damaging wind tend to arrive together in the same storm systems rather than as isolated phenomena.

How much does the number of hail events vary from year to year?

Harris County’s yearly hail-event counts, per NOAA: 17 in 2016, 7 in 2017, 2 in 2018, 17 in 2019, 23 in 2020, 13 in 2021, zero in 2022, 28 in 2023, 28 in 2024, and 8 in 2025. The swing from zero events to 28 in adjacent years is itself the most informative number here.

A single year with zero recorded hail events (2022) doesn’t mean hail risk disappeared from Harris County — it means no qualifying report was logged that year, sandwiched between 13 events in 2021 and 28 in 2023. That volatility is the honest takeaway: any single year’s count is a poor predictor of the next year’s, in either direction.

How large does hail get in the Cypress and Harris County area?

The largest hailstone NOAA recorded in Harris County from 2020 through 2025 measured 2.00 inches in diameter, reported on April 5, 2023. The National Weather Service classifies a thunderstorm as severe once hail reaches 1 inch or larger, wind gusts reach 58 mph or higher, or a tornado forms.

That 2.00-inch stone is the largest logged countywide in the six years the 2020–2025 data covers, and the fuller 2016–2025 record — 143 events, 119 of them severe — suggests stones at or near that size aren’t a once-in-a-decade occurrence for the county as a whole. Cypress specifically doesn’t have its own separate hail-size record in this dataset; the figures above are Harris County-wide, an honest limitation worth naming rather than implying city-specific hail-size data that doesn’t exist.

Is severe weather in the Cypress area seasonal, or can it happen any time of year?

Severe thunderstorms are most common in the spring in southeast Texas, according to the National Weather Service’s Houston/Galveston office, but they can happen at any time of year. The region sees roughly 50 to 60 thunderstorm days annually, with about a third of those becoming severe.

That framing matters more than a specific date range: Harris County’s own year-to-year hail counts above (zero in 2022, 28 in 2023 and 2024) show no dependable calendar window a homeowner could plan storm prep around instead of staying ready year-round. NWS describes the pattern as spring-heavy, not spring-only, and that distinction is worth taking literally rather than compressing into a specific “hail season.”

Has a major severe-weather event actually hit Cypress directly?

Yes. On May 16, 2024, a derecho produced an EF-1 tornado in Cypress along a 1.44-mile path near Tuckerton and Greenhouse Roads, causing an estimated $500,000 in damage, plus a separately logged estimated 90-knot (about 104 mph) wind gust in the same event, per NOAA’s Storm Events Database.

That same regional derecho also produced widespread flash flooding and multi-day power outages for hundreds of thousands of households, with nine fatalities across Houston — a scale of damage distinct from the routine hail-event counts above, and a reminder that Harris County’s storm risk includes damaging wind and tornadoes, not hail alone. See Cypress, TX storm history for the full local record, and the Local Facts Data page for every figure’s underlying source.