MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
If you've ever had to deal with hail damage, you know it can be a headache, an expensive headache. Well, research is underway to help make the forecasting of storms that produce hail more timely and accurate. Reporter and meteorologist Nick Gilmore, with member station Radio IQ, reports on one project working on that.
NICK GILMORE, BYLINE: OK, just imagine this. It's a warm afternoon. You're relaxing on your porch when a storm starts to roll over.
(SOUNDBITE OF STORM THUNDERING)
GILMORE: You head indoors as rain begins to fall. As the cracks of thunder get louder, you peek out the window to see large chunks of ice on the ground.
(SOUNDBITE OF HAIL FALLING)
GILMORE: That's audio from a hailstorm in rural Virginia last month. If you really think about it, rain makes sense to fall from a storm, but large pieces of ice...
SEAN WAUGH: Hail is one of those things that we don't really know how it forms.
GILMORE: Sean Waugh is a research scientist at NOAA Severe Storms Laboratory. We do know some of the basics. Strong thunderstorms have strong updrafts. Think like a vacuum cleaner that's able to lift moisture high up into the atmosphere - it's cold up there, so that water freezes into a small stone. It collects more water, refreezes as it cycles through the storm. More water, refreezes - you get the idea. Eventually, the hailstone gets too heavy and tumbles to the Earth below. Waugh says wind speed, direction and moisture in the air also play a part in hailstorm development. We also know hail can be expensive.
IAN GIAMMANCO: In any given year, it's 60- to 80% of the damage that comes from severe thunderstorms.
GILMORE: That's Ian Giammanco, a meteorologist at the Insurance Institute for Business & Home safety. He says, we're just getting more hailstorms these days.
GIAMMANCO: Rewind the clock all the way back to 2008. So every year since then, we've had over $10 billion in damage from hail. This has crept up now to a 20- to 30 billion-dollar problem.
GILMORE: Giammanco says, that's why research like what Sean Waugh is doing is so important, finding out what hail looks like before it hits the ground. Here's Waugh.
WAUGH: All of our observations - basically, as long as we've been doing hail research - is postimpact. We don't know what broke when it landed. How much of that mass or size or shape have we lost between when it fell and when we find it?
GILMORE: That information could help us better understand how hail shows up on radar in real time, to maybe give folks in the way of a hailstorm a little more time to get to shelter. It could also help us know more about the size of the stones.
WAUGH: Most people want to know if there's going to be golf balls falling at their house or softballs falling at their house. There's a very big difference between those.
GILMORE: Waugh and his team have built a complex rig that observes hail in free fall and in real time. They head out from Oklahoma typically to the Southern plains to get the system in front of a storm producing large hail. The rig has high-speed and high-quality cameras, and Waugh says there's another key component.
WAUGH: We need a lot of light to do that. Otherwise, the image would just be dark. So the LED array I have on the back of the truck produces about 30% more light than the sun. You actually need eclipse glasses standing behind the vehicle to look at it.
GILMORE: The imagery that comes back is breathtaking. Picture a black-and-white animation in slow motion, showing a large, unaltered hailstone plummeting to the ground before shattering into hundreds of pieces. Right now, Waugh is working on getting his system onto more trucks because it's hard to get in just the right place at the right time to capture large hail.
(SOUNDBITE OF HAIL FALLING)
GILMORE: So this is what a typical day in the office sounds like for him right now. For NPR News, I'm Nick Gilmore.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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