A Workshop on North American Hail and Hailstorms: What Next?

Abstract

Hailstorms have caused over $10 billion in damage for each of the last 11 years, according to insurance industry estimates. From 1960 through the early 1980s considerable research was conducted on hail and hailstorms. The work investigated the possibility of mitigating hailstorms through weather modification. The research outputs provided foundational knowledge on hailstone properties, microphysics, and severe storm dynamics. Until a recent resurgence, little attention was paid to hail within the research communities, relative to more threatening perils (e.g., tornadoes, hurricanes), despite the mounting costs of hail damage across the globe. Fatalities and injuries to humans from hail are quite rare, but it is a peril to livestock, and damages now are comparable to other severe weather hazards. Annual severe convective storm losses now typically fall between $15 and $17 billion according to multiple estimates from the analytics and brokerage firm AON, global reinsurer MunichRe, and catastrophe modeling firm Risk Management Solutions (RMS). Of those losses, the catastrophe modeling industry estimates that, in any given year, 60%–80% of the damage is from hail. The level of damage is now comparable to the annual mean losses from landfalling tropical cyclones in the United States (Klotzbach et al. 2018). Despite the high financial toll of hailstorms, research output on this peril has remained relatively constant. Figure 1 provides a time history of AMS journal publications that have “hail” or “hailstorm/s” in the title or as a keyword relative to other topics (i.e., hurricanes/tropical cyclones, tornadoes, and climate change). Even with an increasing number of available journals for publication, articles focused on hailstones have shown no upward trend while as a whole hail research publications have shown only a small increase.