A Closer Look at Hailstorm Risk
We don’t talk too much about hailstorm events on this blog, but perhaps we should – apparently hailstorms are the most expensive storm hazard for the insurance industry, with damages from a single storm sometimes exceeding an eye-popping $1 billion. Luckily, new detection techniques are being developed which should help both utilities and customers gear up whenever a hailstorm event is immanent.
What’s Being Done to Improve Hailstorm Detection?
Hail is formed when strong updrafts are created within severe thunderstorms, and these updrafts have unique characteristics that are measurable and often definable. For example, cloud tops that are highly textured and cold – called “overshooting tops” – are a telltale sign of a hailstorm.
With that in mind, NASA is working with several industry partners to develop satellite technology to detect hailstorms, hail damage, and improve our understanding of hail frequency. The satellites will collect tens of thousands of data points on the duration, size, severity, moisture, temperature, speed and direction of hailstorms. The scientists will also collect historical data points from multiple third-party satellite instruments to analyze historic trends and patterns.
This data will be plugged into simulation models that will simulate hail events over thousands of years, followed by additional analysis. The ultimate goal is to be able to utilize this technology to create massive datasets to enable the development of hailstorm maps and prediction & forecasting models.
This would be a huge boon for emergency preparedness, both within the utility industry as well as for other industries. Currently, there is no mechanism to accurately predict where a hailstorm will occur and how severe and widespread it might be. So, this initiative is definitely a step in the right direction, but it will be some time before it can be applied here in the U.S. NASA’s initial priority is a hail risk model for South America, where hail events account for about 50% of the total value of insured natural disaster losses.
In any case, the risk of a hailstorm causing an outage is real and is probably on the rise, so while we wait for better forecasting tools, it makes sense to at least capture a planned response to this type of event in emergency plans.
