If you feel like there’s been more hail in south-east Queensland this storm season, you would be correct.

It has indeed been a more active season so far, Bureau of Meteorology senior forecaster Shane Kennedy said.

“Since July, we’ve had 10 days with giant hail,” Kennedy said. The average for late November is four days.

“So more than double the normal and even compared to last season, which was pretty active, we had at this point seven days with giant hail,” Kennedy said. “So well above that average and more than last year.”

As temperatures warm up heading into the new year, it is likely we will experience heavy rainfall with less hail, Kennedy said.

Brisbane’s western suburbs may also be a hot spot for this weather due to thunderstorms forming on nearby mountains.

“A lot of the time they form in the west and then are pointed towards the city either travelling east or more north-east, so that’s often why the western suburbs generally are more active, or will get more severe thunderstorms,” Kennedy said.

The area near the coast on the Queensland and NSW border is a hot spot for severe thunderstorms in general, he said.

Hail comes out of the most severe thunderstorms and “weather is certainly getting more severe”, Dr Tim Raupach from UNSW Sydney’s Institute for Climate Risk and Response said.

“Those thunderstorms are the ones that have really strong updrafts, so they have winds that are going from the surface up high into the atmosphere that can take moisture and can support the growth of really large hail,” he said.

“Because these updrafts are going upwards, it brings moisture very high in the atmosphere where it’s really cold.

“And up there you get ice forming, but also super cooled liquid water, which is water that is below the freezing level but it’s still liquid, and then when the super cooled liquid attaches to small ice particles, it freezes on, and so the more super cooled liquid you get attaching to these ice particles, the larger your hailstones can grow.

“There’s good evidence they get larger when the atmosphere is warmer, but as for the changes in how often hail occurs, that’s more complicated because as the atmosphere gets warmer, more of it melts away.”

The jagged, knobbly hail seen in recent storms is due to what is called wet growth, Raupach said.

“Some of that liquid water stays liquid for just a short time before it freezes solid,” he said.

“When it’s still liquid, if that stone is rotating or tumbling as it falls, then it can spin out some of the liquid and start to form these knobbles or lobes, we call them, on the hailstones, and that’s how you can get these stones that have kind of a funny knobbly appearance.”

On the other hand, dry growth is where the ice freezes on straight away.

“It really depends on the storm and where in the storm the hail forms and the temperatures under which it forms and whether the stones are tumbling as they fall,” Raupach said.

There is “natural variability” at play when it comes to severity of storms year upon year, Raupach said.

“We have some years that are quieter and some years where there are more storms,” he said. “And so it can be difficult to separate what is natural variability from what is variability caused by things like changing climate.”

Reducing greenhouse gas emissions is the “obvious” answer for reducing the increase in severe storms, Raupach said.

“We’re still in the driver’s seat when it comes to our greenhouse gas emissions, and we can reduce how much of these gasses we put out so that the changes are more on the minor end than on the major end,” he said.

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