Between 5-10 p.m. CDT on this Sunday late afternoon-evening, a lone, strong to marginally-severe thunderstorm trudged along a roughly 40-mile west-to-east path from northwestern Adams County (initiating near Kenesaw) to northeastern Clay County (dissipating near Saronville), dumping a considerable quantity of hail along the way. While the majority of hail was small (most ground-truth reports pea to dime size), a limited percentage of stones were as large as quarter to half dollar size...including at the NWS Hastings office and KSNB-TV studios just north of the city (where hail fell for roughly 30 minutes as the storm passed through mainly 645-715 p.m. CDT). Reports and news coverage from this area depicted hail covering the ground to a depth of at least a few inches, along with ditches partially filled with water from heavy rain. Despite this being an overall low-impact event that affected only a tiny fraction of the South Central Nebraska area, this rogue, very slow-moving storm (forward motion only 5-10 MPH) received an unusual amount of local media attention given that it tracked directly over the KSNB-TV studios. Because the storm's precipitation/hail core was fairly small (only a few miles across), there was a sharp gradient in impacts/rain totals, with this gradient well-sampled in observations across the more populated Hastings area. For example, the NWS Hastings office (four miles north of downtown) endured the aforementioned abundance of hail up to half dollar size, along with 1.55 of rain (some of the hail did not melt until late the following morning). However, a CoCoRaHS observer only two miles south of the NWS office (near Lake Hastings) reported only 0.37 of rain and pea size hail. And finally, another CoCoRaHS observer on the far south edge of Hastings (six miles south of the NWS office) received no rain/hail whatsoever.
From a local NWS forecast perspective, the intensity/longevity of this strong to at-times severe hail storm (including its supercell characteristics) was somewhat of a surprise given what appeared to be a fairly innocuous combination of instability/shear. In the mid-upper levels, flow aloft was fairly weak out of the west-northwest, although a low-amplitude shortwave trough approaching South Central Nebraska from the Central High Plains provided modest lift. At the surface, this storm initiated during peak afternoon heating along a relatively well-defined, north-northeast to south-southwest oriented quasi-stationary front, in an environment characterized by temperatures in the mid-70s (F) and dewpoints only in the mid-upper 40s (although these seasonably-modest dewpoints represented an impressive diurnal climb considering that the day began with values only in the 20s). Around the time the storm reached peaked intensity over the north Hastings area, it resided in a mesoscale environment indicated to have only 20-25 knots of deep-layer wind shear, and within a narrow corridor of only 500-1000 J/kg mixed-layer CAPE just ahead of the surface front.

Hail in ADAMS, NEBRASKA
From 09-APR-23 18:00:00 to 09-APR-23 18:03:00 (CST-6)
Location: (HSI)HASTINGS ARPT
Magnitude: 1.25 
Property damage: 0.00K
Crop damage: 0.00K
Reported by: Official NWS Observations

Quarter to half dollar size hail was reported, including at the NWS office four miles north of downtown Hastings.