UTILIZATION OF HAIL-DAY DATA IN DESIGNING AND EVALUATING HAIL SUPPRESSION PROJECTS

Abstract

Historical hail-day records of U.S. Weather Bureau first-order stations and cooperative substations are the only long, objective records of hail occurrence available throughout the United States. Although hail-day data are limited in areal density and are not necessarily the most desired measure of seeding effects, they are the only data available to obtain a measure of the areal-temporal variability of hail for most areas of the United States. Consequently, hail-day data from Illinois have been employed in a pilot project to determine the time required to obtain statistically significant changes in hail-day frequencies over various sized areas. Four statistical designs were investigated using the historical hail-day data for five areas in Illinois. The results show that the optimum design for hail-day data is the continuous seeding (seeding on all days likely to have hail) over an area. The optimum test is the sequential test involving the Poisson and Negative Binomial distributions. Detection of a 20-percent reduction in summer hail days would require, on the average, a continuous seeding program ranging from 13 to 37 yr, depending on the level of precision desired, and the size and location of the seeded area. Major reductions, those in excess of 60 percent, would require experiments of only 1- to 3-yr length.