Latest news with #NorthernHailProject
CBC
2 days ago
- Climate
- CBC
Researchers chase storms, study fist-sized stones in Alberta's 'Hailstorm Alley'
Social Sharing Julian Brimelow holds up a replica of the mother of all hailstones — a lumpy white blob as big as your fist carrying the weight of two baseballs with the power to pulverize fields of corn into green-yellow mush. Brimelow and other researchers from Western University in London, Ont., are using it in their research to better understand and predict Alberta's prevalent hailstorm activity, and mitigate harm to people and property. Hail can be bad across the Prairies. But Brimelow says when it hits in Alberta, it hits hard. "It's much worse than I thought it could be in terms of damage potential," Brimelow said Tuesday at the project's open house at the Telus Spark Science Centre. "On the same day as the (2024) Calgary hailstorm, there was a storm farther south and that decimated six to seven-foot corn crops to the point that our team wasn't sure it was actually corn," he said. "It was that pummeled into the ground." WATCH | The Northern Hail Project surveys the damage caused by Calgary's recent hailstorm How a Canadian storm laboratory is investigating Calgary's hail damage 4 days ago The Canadian Severe Storms Laboratory at Western University in London, Ont., has dispatched a damage survey team to chase and investigate destruction from Alberta storms this summer. The 'Northern Hail Project' crew went out with the CBC's Acton Clarkin after a major hailstorm hit pockets of Calgary. "Hailstorm Alley" runs from High River, just south of Calgary, north to central Alberta. The area sees more than 40 hailstorms every summer, causing hundreds of millions of dollars in damage. Brimelow, executive director of the Northern Hail Project — a branch of Western University's Canadian Severe Storms Laboratory — said it's probably the most active hailstorm zone in Canada. A storm in Calgary last August brought significant hail, strong winds, heavy rain and localized flooding, affecting about one in five homes. The Insurance Bureau of Canada estimated the damage to the city, deemed the country's second-costliest weather-related disaster, at $2.8 billion. Hailstones as big as golf balls hammered the tarmac at Calgary International Airport, damaging planes at WestJet and Flair Airlines, and forcing them to ground 10 per cent of their fleets for repairs and inspections. Brimelow said such hailstorms are underestimated at one's peril. Several small animals and pets were killed in Calgary last year, he said, and an infant was killed in Europe in 2023. The research sees stones collected on scene, preserved in a mobile freezer, and later measured, weighed, photographed and perhaps replicated. "The more interesting stones we'll 3D scan and then we can make prints," he said. Copies of several realistic hailstones were on display at the open house, ranging in size from a walnut to a golf ball and one bigger than a large hand. "This is the new record-sized Canadian stone. This fell in 2022 near Innisfail," Brimelow said. "This is 12.3 centimetres across and nearly weighs 300 grams. This would have been falling at 160-plus kilometres an hour." The team's field co-ordinator, Jack Hamilton, said the size and shape of the stones provide researchers with information on what happens inside the storms. "It was long thought that the hailstone sort of goes through the storm in a washing machine cycle. But we're actually learning that it's probably just once, maybe twice, that the hailstone goes through the storm and it collects all of its mass in that one travel through," Hamilton said. "It gets bigger and bigger, and eventually gravity takes over and it falls. And it falls pretty fast." To get the stones, they first have to chase them. Hamilton said their chase vehicles have a protective coating against hail and are equipped with storm-locating radar and a lightning detector for safety.
CTV News
2 days ago
- Climate
- CTV News
Researchers chase storms, study fist-sized stones in Alberta's ‘Hailstorm Alley'
Julian Brimelow, executive director of the Northern Hail Project, displays a 3D replica of a near record hailstone collected in 2022, at the Telus Spark Science Centre in Calgary, on Tuesday, July 22, 2025. (THE CANADIAN PRESS/Bill Graveland) Julian Brimelow holds up a replica of the mother of all hailstones – a lumpy white blob as big as your fist carrying the weight of two baseballs with the power to pulverize fields of corn into green-yellow mush. Brimelow and other researchers from Western University in London, Ont., are using it in their research to better understand and predict Alberta's prevalent hailstorm activity and mitigate harm to people and property. Hail can be bad across the Prairies. But Brimelow says when it hits in Alberta, it hits hard. 'It's much worse than I thought it could be in terms of damage potential,' Brimelow said Tuesday at the project's open house at the Telus Spark Science Centre. 'On the same day as the (2024) Calgary hailstorm, there was a storm farther south and that decimated six to seven-foot corn crops to the point that our team wasn't sure it was actually corn,' he said. 'It was that pummeled into the ground.' 'Hailstorm Alley' runs from High River, just south of Calgary, north to central Alberta. The area sees more than 40 hailstorms every summer, causing hundreds of millions of dollars in damage. Brimelow, executive director of the Northern Hail Project — a branch of Western University's Canadian Severe Storms Laboratory — said it's probably the most active hailstorm zone in Canada. A storm in Calgary last August brought significant hail, strong winds, heavy rain and localized flooding, affecting about one in five homes. The Insurance Bureau of Canada estimated the damage to the city, deemed the country's second-costliest weather-related disaster, at $2.8 billion. Hailstones as big as golf balls hammered the tarmac at Calgary International Airport, damaging planes at WestJet and Flair Airlines and forcing them to ground 10 per cent of their fleets for repairs and inspections. Brimelow said such hailstorms are underestimated at one's peril. Several small animals and pets were killed in Calgary last year, he said, and an infant was killed in Europe in 2023. The research sees stones collected on scene, preserved in a mobile freezer, and later measured, weighed, photographed and perhaps replicated. 'The more interesting stones we'll 3D scan and then we can make prints,' he said. Copies of several realistic hailstones were on display at the open house, ranging in size from a walnut to a golf ball and one bigger than a large hand. 'This is the new record-sized Canadian stone. This fell in 2022 near Innisfail,' Brimelow said. 'This is 12.3 centimetres across and nearly weighs 300 grams. This would have been falling at 160-plus kilometres an hour.' The team's field co-ordinator, Jack Hamilton, said the size and shape of the stones provide researchers with information on what happens inside the storms. 'It was long thought that the hailstone sort of goes through the storm in a washing machine cycle. But we're actually learning that it's probably just once, maybe twice, that the hailstone goes through the storm and it collects all of its mass in that one travel through,' Hamilton said. 'It gets bigger and bigger, and eventually gravity takes over and it falls. And it falls pretty fast.' To get the stones, they first have to chase them. Hamilton said their chase vehicles have a protective coating against hail and are equipped with storm-locating radar and a lightning detector for safety. 'Our primary objective is to collect as much data as we possibly can,' he said. 'We go in behind these storms, and we collect the hail that falls behind it.' This report by The Canadian Press was first published July 22, 2025. Bill Graveland, The Canadian Press
Global News
2 days ago
- Climate
- Global News
Researchers chase storms, study fist-sized stones in Alberta's ‘Hailstorm Alley'
Julian Brimelow holds up a replica of the mother of all hailstones – a lumpy white blob as big as your fist carrying the weight of two baseballs with the power to pulverize fields of corn into green-yellow mush. Brimelow and other researchers from Western University in London, Ont., are using it in their research to better understand and predict Alberta's prevalent hailstorm activity and mitigate harm to people and property. Hail can be bad across the Prairies. But Brimelow says when it hits in Alberta, it hits hard. 'It's much worse than I thought it could be in terms of damage potential,' Brimelow said Tuesday at the project's open house at the Telus Spark Science Centre. 'On the same day as the (2024) Calgary hailstorm, there was a storm farther south and that decimated six to seven-foot corn crops to the point that our team wasn't sure it was actually corn,' he said. 'It was that pummeled into the ground.' Story continues below advertisement View image in full screen Members of the public examine a replica of a record breaking hailstone on display at an information session hosted by the Northern Hail Project Tuesday at Spark Science Centre in Calgary. Global News 'Hailstorm Alley' runs from High River, just south of Calgary, north to central Alberta. The area sees more than 40 hailstorms every summer, causing hundreds of millions of dollars in damage. Brimelow, executive director of the Northern Hail Project — a branch of Western University's Canadian Severe Storms Laboratory — said it's probably the most active hailstorm zone in Canada. 0:58 Researchers say Alberta's largest documented hailstone fell Monday, measuring 12 cm A storm in Calgary last August brought significant hail, strong winds, heavy rain and localized flooding, affecting about one in five homes. Story continues below advertisement The Insurance Bureau of Canada estimated the damage to the city, deemed the country's second-costliest weather-related disaster, at $3.25 billion. Get daily National news Get the day's top news, political, economic, and current affairs headlines, delivered to your inbox once a day. Sign up for daily National newsletter Sign Up By providing your email address, you have read and agree to Global News' Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy Hailstones as big as golf balls hammered the tarmac at Calgary International Airport, damaging planes at WestJet and Flair Airlines and forcing them to ground 10 per cent of their fleets for repairs and inspections. View image in full screen One of the thousands of homes that were heavily damaged by a monster hailstorm that hit northeast Calgary in August of 2024. The $3.25 billion in insurable damage made it the second costliest disaster in Canadian history. Global News Brimelow said such hailstorms are underestimated at one's peril. Several small animals and pets were killed in Calgary last year, he said, and an infant was killed in Europe in 2023. The research sees stones collected on scene, preserved in a mobile freezer, and later measured, weighed, photographed and perhaps replicated. 'The more interesting stones we'll 3D scan and then we can make prints,' he said. Story continues below advertisement Copies of several realistic hailstones were on display at the open house, ranging in size from a walnut to a golf ball and one bigger than a large hand. 'This is the new record-sized Canadian stone. This fell in 2022 near Innisfail,' Brimelow said. 'This is 12.3 centimetres across and nearly weighs 300 grams. This would have been falling at 160-plus kilometres an hour.' View image in full screen Researchers with the Northern Hail Project explain the science of hailstorm to interested members of the public during an information session at Calgary's Spark Science Centre on Tuesday, July 22, 2025. Global News The team's field co-ordinator, Jack Hamilton, said the size and shape of the stones provide researchers with information on what happens inside the storms. 'It was long thought that the hailstone sort of goes through the storm in a washing machine cycle. But we're actually learning that it's probably just once, maybe twice, that the hailstone goes through the storm and it collects all of its mass in that one travel through,' Hamilton said. Story continues below advertisement 'It gets bigger and bigger, and eventually gravity takes over and it falls. And it falls pretty fast.' To get the stones, they first have to chase them. Hamilton said their chase vehicles have a protective coating against hail and are equipped with storm-locating radar and a lightning detector for safety. 'Our primary objective is to collect as much data as we possibly can,' he said. 'We go in behind these storms, and we collect the hail that falls behind it.'
Winnipeg Free Press
2 days ago
- Climate
- Winnipeg Free Press
Researchers chase storms, study fist-sized stones in Alberta's ‘Hailstorm Alley'
CALGARY – Julian Brimelow holds up a replica of the mother of all hailstones – a lumpy white blob as big as your fist carrying the weight of two baseballs with the power to pulverize fields of corn into green-yellow mush. Brimelow and other researchers from Western University in London, Ont., are using it in their research to better understand and predict Alberta's prevalent hailstorm activity and mitigate harm to people and property. Hail can be bad across the Prairies. But Brimelow says when it hits in Alberta, it hits hard. Julian Brimelow, executive director of the Northern Hail Project, displays a 3D replica of a near record hailstone collected in 2022, at the Telus Spark Science Centre in Calgary, on Tuesday, July 22, 2025. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Bill Graveland 'It's much worse than I thought it could be in terms of damage potential,' Brimelow said Tuesday at the project's open house at the Telus Spark Science Centre. 'On the same day as the (2024) Calgary hailstorm, there was a storm farther south and that decimated six to seven-foot corn crops to the point that our team wasn't sure it was actually corn,' he said. 'It was that pummeled into the ground.' 'Hailstorm Alley' runs from High River, just south of Calgary, north to central Alberta. The area sees more than 40 hailstorms every summer, causing hundreds of millions of dollars in damage. Brimelow, executive director of the Northern Hail Project — a branch of Western University's Canadian Severe Storms Laboratory — said it's probably the most active hailstorm zone in Canada. A storm in Calgary last August brought significant hail, strong winds, heavy rain and localized flooding, affecting about one in five homes. The Insurance Bureau of Canada estimated the damage to the city, deemed the country's second-costliest weather-related disaster, at $2.8 billion. Hailstones as big as golf balls hammered the tarmac at Calgary International Airport, damaging planes at WestJet and Flair Airlines and forcing them to ground 10 per cent of their fleets for repairs and inspections. Brimelow said such hailstorms are underestimated at one's peril. Several small animals and pets were killed in Calgary last year, he said, and an infant was killed in Europe in 2023. The research sees stones collected on scene, preserved in a mobile freezer, and later measured, weighed, photographed and perhaps replicated. 'The more interesting stones we'll 3D scan and then we can make prints,' he said. Copies of several realistic hailstones were on display at the open house, ranging in size from a walnut to a golf ball and one bigger than a large hand. 'This is the new record-sized Canadian stone. This fell in 2022 near Innisfail,' Brimelow said. 'This is 12.3 centimetres across and nearly weighs 300 grams. This would have been falling at 160-plus kilometres an hour.' The team's field co-ordinator, Jack Hamilton, said the size and shape of the stones provide researchers with information on what happens inside the storms. 'It was long thought that the hailstone sort of goes through the storm in a washing machine cycle. But we're actually learning that it's probably just once, maybe twice, that the hailstone goes through the storm and it collects all of its mass in that one travel through,' Hamilton said. Winnipeg Free Press | Newsletter Jen Zoratti | Next Wednesdays Columnist Jen Zoratti looks at what's next in arts, life and pop culture. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. 'It gets bigger and bigger, and eventually gravity takes over and it falls. And it falls pretty fast.' To get the stones, they first have to chase them. Hamilton said their chase vehicles have a protective coating against hail and are equipped with storm-locating radar and a lightning detector for safety. 'Our primary objective is to collect as much data as we possibly can,' he said. 'We go in behind these storms, and we collect the hail that falls behind it.' This report by The Canadian Press was first published July 22, 2025.
CBC
4 days ago
- Climate
- CBC
Hail-focused research projects 'long past due' in Canada, U.S., prof says
A new project that aims to better predict when hail will hit and how big it will be might save people big bucks in damage repairs someday. Project ICECHIP (In-situ Collaborative Experiment for the Collection of Hail In the Plains) involved dozens of researchers who spent six weeks chasing, driving and running into storms across the Great Plains in the U.S. to collect fresh hail and study it by measuring, weighing, slicing and crushing the stones to reveal what's inside. Researchers hope the hailstones will reveal secrets about storms, damage and maybe the air itself. The research was done to help improve radar-based hail detection, hail models and forecasting. The aim is to better predict hailstorms and lessen the costly damage they cause. The project, which was the largest hail-focused study in the U.S. in over four decades, involved two teams of researchers, 15 different research institutions and three international partners — including Canada's Northern Hail Project. Becky Adams-Selin, Project ICECHIP's lead principal investigator, says although hail is a worldwide problem, it hasn't gotten much attention until recent decades because it "doesn't kill people like tornadoes do." "There was a lot of focus on tornadoes first to kind of get that warning system down, which makes sense," she said. "Hail didn't really start hitting people's pocketbooks until maybe the last two decades." 40,000 hail-related claims Hail, combined with urban sprawl and deteriorating roofing materials, has created "a perfect storm," she said, and insurance companies are starting to feel the pinch. "It's become a lot more evident that some of the things we don't know about hail are really causing a lot of problems," Adams-Selin said. Data from Manitoba's public auto insurer suggests how the number of hailstorms has varied in the province over the last five years. Manitoba Public Insurance says it has received over 40,000 hail-related claims since 2021. There were 1,300 hail-related claims in 2021 and nearly 3,700 claims in 2022, but the number skyrocketed in 2023, with nearly 28,000 claims submitted. It received almost 9,300 hail-related claims in 2024. So far this year, MPI has gotten just over 700 claims submitted as of Friday. a temporary hail-damage estimate centre in order to deal with a barrage of claims, on top of claims from a massive storm in Winnipeg in August 2023 that brought golf-ball-sized hail to some areas, MPI said. Hail-focused research in Canada and the U.S. is "long past due," said John Hanesiak, a professor at the University of Manitoba's department of environment and geography who works with the Northern Hail Project, which is conducting similar research in Alberta this summer. "This is sort of one of the first projects that's been dedicated to hail [in the U.S.] in 40 years, and the same thing can be said in Canada," he said. Canada's last major hail-focused research project was the Alberta Hail Project, which ran from 1956 to 1985, Hanesiak said. Predicting when hail will hit and how big it will be is "an evolving science," but cutting open a hailstone and analyzing its shape and density can give researchers a better idea of how it grew, he said. "If we're able to measure at the ground, if we're able to measure the size distributions of the hail and collect hailstones from real storms, we can much better understand how they grow in certain conditions." Weather balloons can also help researchers understand what meteorological conditions produce specific hailstorms and hail sizes, but Hanesiak said weather balloons are limited in Canada. The balloons gather weather data from the upper atmosphere, including temperature, humidity and air pressure. In southern parts of Saskatchewan and Manitoba, there are no readings from weather balloons, he said. Hanesiak said his hope is that the projects will help researchers determine whether there are any differences between American and Canadian hailstorms. Keith Porter, chief engineer at the Ontario-based Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction, which partially funds the Northern Hail Project, says hail is rarely deadly but can be extremely costly. A Calgary hailstorm in August was Canada's most destructive weather event of 2024, damaging homes, businesses, cars and the Calgary International Airport, resulting in $3 billion in insured losses, according to Catastrophe Indices and Quantification, which provides data to the insurance industry. The best way to protect property from hail damage is by parking in a garage and installing impact-resistant roofing and siding on houses and other buildings, Porter said. "The research helps us to tell [people] what the benefit of doing that is, why they should do it, [and] what's in it for them to save." Porter said hail damage is everyone's problem.
