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NBC News
2 days ago
- Climate
- NBC News
Hail chasers: Meet the weather detectives trying to decipher why hail is becoming a bigger problem
The chase From mid-May through the end of June, ICECHIP storm chasers traveled across the Front Range of the Rockies and the central Plains, sometimes riding in vehicles armored against falling ice. They launched drones, released weather balloons and set up mobile doppler radars — all techniques honed by tornado chasers. As one group positioned mobile doppler radars to intercept the storm at close range, other researchers were responsible for releasing weather balloons nearby or setting out sensors to measure the size and velocity of a hail strike. During some storms, researchers released hundreds of pingpong ball-like devices called hailsondes into the tempests' path to track the life cycle of a hail stone — when it is melting and freezing, and how wind dynamics that lift and drop these chunks of ice affect their growth. Convective thunderstorms, with big internal updrafts, generate hail by circulating a mix of water and ice crystals into the freezing layers of the upper atmosphere. Hail typically forms at altitudes of 20,000 to 50,000 feet, where temperatures are between minus 22 degrees and 14 degrees Fahrenheit. Those same updrafts sweep hailsondes into the hail-generating parts of each storm. 'If we can track that sensor with time, we're going to, at least for a couple of these storms, understand the exact path, the exact trajectory that a hailstone takes,' said Victor Gensini, a professor of meteorology at Northern Illinois University and an ICECHIP principal investigator. In an atmosphere warmed by climate change, 'we get a lot more instability,' Gensini said, which researchers think creates stronger updrafts. Those stronger updrafts can support larger hailstones for more time, which allows balls or discs of ice to gain mass, before gravity sends them racing to the ground. 'It's kind of like if you take a hair dryer and turn it on its end, it's pretty easy to balance a pingpong ball, right, in that airstream,' Gensini explained. 'But what would you need to balance a softball? You would need a much stronger updraft stream.' Storm modeling suggests stronger updrafts will increase the frequency of large hail in the future, even as it decreases the likelihood of hail overall. Researchers suspect small hail will decrease because its lower mass means that it will take longer to fall. By the time it's close to the surface, it has often melted down to water. 'There's this kind of dichotomy, right, where you get less small hail but more large hail in these warmer atmospheres that have very strong updrafts,' Gensini said. During their field campaign, the researchers amassed a collection of more than 10,000 hailstones in chests of dry ice to try to determine if their computer models are getting the dynamics of hail growth right. 'The hail record is kind of messy,' Gensini said of previous data, adding that observers have recorded more 2-, 3- and 4-inch hailstones, but it's not clear if that's because more people are chasing and finding big hail or because the atmosphere is producing more of it. Gensini said the new measurements will help researchers compare what is happening in the air to what they're finding on the ground, which should improve hail forecasts and mitigate economic losses. In many of the areas where ICECHIP is working, there's a lot of agriculture, according to Karen Kosiba, an atmospheric scientist with the University of Illinois Flexible Array of Radars and Mesonets team who is also working with ICECHIP. 'It affects their crops, their machinery, getting stuff into shelter,' she said. 'There's a lot of economic ties to the weather.'
Axios
18-06-2025
- Climate
- Axios
CU's storm chasers are studying hailstorms
University of Colorado Boulder's Eric Frew is eager to get a drone in the air. It's June in the Plains, and that means hailstorm season. Why it matters: Hail causes billions of dollars in damage every year and leads to higher insurance rates nationwide. Yet, we know little about how it forms, says Frew. What he's saying: "We need better scientific understanding to make better forecast models, to build better homes, and all the things that you can do with a better understanding of this," he tells us hours before he leaves for western Nebraska. State of play: Frew and his small team of students are part of the largest hail study in decades, dubbed ICECHIP. It involves roughly 70 private and public researchers, and includes scientists from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder. Zoom in: The CU team is spending six weeks through the end of June looking for storm clouds on the Front Range and across the Great Plains. Frew — the director of the Center for Autonomous Air Mobility and Sensing — is tasked with using a drone to map the hailstorm damage from above. "Our team is actually going right behind the storm to try to image … the full extent of where it fell. And you need all of that information together to really understand what's going on with this hail," he says. The intrigue: The drone they are using is the inspiration for the one featured in the blockbuster movie "Twisters." "I want to stress they got the design from us, not the other way around," Frew says with a laugh. Yes, but: No tornado chasing for this team. Frew says hail can cause more damage and is often hard to detect. "It's not quite as crazy as what the movies look like," he allows. "Although … I worry more about the damage hail can do than a tornado, because you can see the tornado a little bit more easily."
Japan Today
17-06-2025
- Climate
- Japan Today
Ping, ping ping. Here's what it's like to drive into a big hailstorm in the name of science
Tony Illenden crouches in a helmet and gloves outside Northern Illinois University's Husky Hail Hunter vehicle to scoop hail into a bag during a storm while on a Project ICECHIP operation in Levelland, Texas. By SETH BORENSTEIN, BRITTANY PETERSON and CAROLYN KASTER Wind roared against the SUV's windows as its tires sloshed through water dumped onto the road by the downpour. A horizon-wide funnel cloud loomed out the window, several miles away. Then came the loud metallic pings on the roof. First one, then another. Then it was too fast to count and too loud to hear much of anything else. Hailstones were pelting down, and the car was driving toward them. 'How big are they?' meteorology professor Kelly Lombardo asked from the passenger seat. 'Probably no more than a nickel or dime, but they're just flowing at 50 mph,' said fellow researcher Matthew Kumjian as he steered through the flooded road. Lombardo and Kumjian are part of a team of about 60 researchers chasing hail across the Great Plains to better forecast an underappreciated hazard that causes about $10 billion a year in damage in the U.S. The researchers brought along three Associated Press journalists to observe the first-of-its kind project called ICECHIP, including trips into the heart of the storms in fortified vehicles like the one driven by Kumjian. The payoff is data that could improve hail forecasts. Knowing what's going on inside a storm is crucial to knowing what's going to happen to people in its path, meteorologists said. 'We have a really tough time forecasting hail size,' said Northern Illinois University meteorology professor Victor Gensini, one of the project leaders. 'All scientific experiments start with data gathering, and without that data we don't know what we're missing. And so that's what this project is all about.' On this afternoon, Lombardo and Kumjian, Penn State University professors who are married to each other, were negotiating rapid weather changes while collecting their data. Minutes before the hail started, the couple were launching three-foot wide weather balloons designed to give scientists a glimpse of what's happening in the leading edge of the storm. A tornado in the distance was slowly getting closer. Soon cell phones blared tornado alarms, and a nearby town's storm sirens roared to life. The couple jumped in the car and drove into a part of the storm where they could collect hail after it fell, the same stretch of flooded road where they encountered the 50 mph winds. A wind-meter protruding from the black SUV's front captured data that was displayed on Lombardo's laptop. 'This is up there in terms of severity of winds and intensity of precipitation,' Kumjian told an AP reporter after finding a safe place to pull over. Elsewhere in the storm, Joshua Soderholm of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology launched weather balloons carrying devices built to mimic golf ball-sized hail and outfitted with microphones and special sensors. One flew up 8.9 miles at 163 mph. 'It's free floating. It does whatever the storm wants it to do,' Soderholm said. 'This is the only way you could actually get a measurement of what a hail storm might be doing.'' Researchers also deploy special funnels that capture pristine hail, crushers that measure how strong the ice balls are and other high-tech machinery, including radar and drones. The teams also use a variety of gear and practices to stay coordinated and safe. At morning briefings, they review forecasts to plan the safest way to reach the storms producing the most hail. At their destination, teams set up at varying distances to the storms, with three fortified vehicles driving into the heart of the weather. Each vehicle has radar screens in the front seats showing brilliant reds, oranges and yellows of the storm they chase. Gensini is in a command vehicle that tracks and deploys the teams based on weather in real time. At times he has to rein in some enthusiastic chasers. So Northern Illinois meteorology student Katie Wargowsky radios a team deep inside a storm to find safety. Twice. The 21-year-old Wargowsky described how becoming a storm chaser began as an effort to overcome weather anxiety so intense she would dry heave while taking shelter in her family's basement. But confronting her fear helped her develop a deep curiosity that led her to chase tornadoes with her father. 'You get a rush of adrenaline,' she said. 'You really start to notice the little things around you, and your head just feels kind of light. Your natural survival instincts tell you, you need to take shelter, and you need hide from it. But you just know that it's about to be some good research, and you are changing the world one storm at a time.' The three fortified vehicles are equipped with special metal mesh to protect their windshields. But it's not foolproof. The SUV driven by the Penn State researchers lost its windshield in May to sideways-blowing hail that flew under the mesh just 15 minutes into their first storm chase. Another one of the fortified vehicles, called the Husky Hail Hunter, was pelted by three-and-half-inch hail during a trip into a storm with an AP photographer aboard. 'We're getting some new dents,' said Tony Illenden, the Northern Illinois student at the wheel. 'This is insane.' When he stepped out to collect a hailstone — wearing a helmet to protect his head — one slammed into his right hand, causing it to swell in what Gensini called the first hail injury of the season. A few days later Illenden, said his hand felt fine. For the storm chasers, the payoff isn't just the data. It's also the natural beauty. Illenden's team, for example, collected a three-inch (81 millimeter) hailstone that looked like a rose. That same night a double rainbow emerged. After the storm passed, several vans descended on a Walmart parking lot to crush hailstones with special machines that measured how much force was needed to shatter them. 'In hailstones we have layers. So we start off with an embryo, and then you've got different growth layers,' said Central Michigan University scientist John Allen. Since May 18, while logging more than 5,700 miles, the team has collected, measured, crushed, weighed and sliced hailstones as big as 5.5 inches, about the size of a DVD. The study funded in part by $11 million from the National Science Foundation, which took eight years to plan, is already paying off even before researchers have had a chance to thoroughly review the data, scientists said. Gensini said one early data trend he's noticing is that 'the largest hail that we found is not where we thought it would be in terms of the Doppler radar.″ And that's an issue because Doppler radar is the only tool forecasters have been using across the country to say where the big dangerous stones should be falling, he said. Given the federal cuts to science, particularly related to the climate, Gensini said this is likely the first and last time a hail project like this can be done, at least for several years. Scientists from the insurance industry, which is helping fund the study, are testing new types of roof shingles that so far seem to resist hail better, said Ian Giammanco, a meteorologist at the Insurance Institute For Business and Home Safety. "One of our goals is to replicate all of this back at our lab so we can really understand how durable our roofing materials are to all the different flavors of hail,' he said. © Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
The Independent
13-06-2025
- Climate
- The Independent
Storm chasers battle brutal hail in name of science
Storm chasers are driving into hailstorms in the United States' Great Plains to study the weather phenomenon, which causes billions in damage annually. A team of meteorologists is using radar and cameras to monitor hail and improve forecasting. ICECHIP, the first US hail-focused field campaign in over 40 years, aims to differentiate between storms producing baseball-sized versus golf ball-sized hail, according to co-lead scientist Victor Gensi. The goal is to provide more precise forecasts to better serve the public with targeted information. Watch the video in full above.
Yahoo
12-06-2025
- Climate
- Yahoo
Watch as storm chasers drive into the heart of a huge hailstorm
Watch as storm chasers drive into the heart of a massive hailstorm to learn more about the weather hazard that causes billions of dollars of damage every year. Footage from the Associated Press shows a team of meteorologists setting up radar systems and cameras in the Great Plains in order to monitor the hail and 'make better forecasts'. Victor Gensi, co-lead scientist of ICECHIP, the first US hail-focused field campaign in over 40 years, said: 'We want to know that a storm is going to produce baseballs and that storm is only going to produce golf balls. And if we can constrain those forecasts, the people receiving that information will be better served.' Student meteorologist Katie Wargowsky said she has to ignore her 'natural instincts to hide' and 'know that you are changing the world one storm at a time'.
