The Northern Hail Project: A renaissance in hail research in Canada

With ever-rising losses caused by extreme weather, the majority of which are associated with severe convective storms (SCS), it is of national importance to advance our understanding of hail occurrence and damage impacts across Canada and improve the means for managing our risk and vulnerability to hail. It has been almost 40 years since the Albert Hail Project (AHP) wrapped up. Although the AHP left a valuable legacy for future research initiatives to build on, the break in substantive hail research since its cessation has led to critical observational and knowledge gaps related to SCS occurrence and their impacts in Canada. It is thus essential that we address the key data and knowledge gaps and provide opportunities to train the next generation of scientists and engineers to work on SCS and their impacts. To this end, the University of Western Ontario has recently launched the Northern Hail Project (NHP). We will provide the background, rationale and expected outcomes for the NHP and also present observations from our first field season in Alberta. The philosophy of the NHP is to undertake world-class and transformative research that is data driven and has real-world applications. This includes deploying Canada's first hail disdrometer and weather station network in Calgary (located in Canada's Hail Alley), installing hailpad networks, sampling and preserving hail collected from hail swaths for analysis, monitoring vegetation health following hailstorms using multi-spectral cameras mounted on UAVs and super-high-resolution satellite imagery. Valuable data will also be collected from a portable testbed comprising a dual-polarization Doppler C-band radar, a lightning mapping array, a surface station mesonet, a mobile mesonet, upper-air soundings and remote-controlled cameras. One of the foci of the testbed is to improve the detection and quantification of hail (and tornadoes) using radar and other remote sensing tools. Collectively these data, and the analysis thereof, are expected to have significant benefits for Canada and internationally. In the long term, detailed data for damaging-hail events over both agricultural land and urban areas will help stakeholders mitigate damage. Our climatology of damaging hail events will allow improved risk and catastrophe models for the insurance sector. The improved understanding of how hailstorms form will improve warning systems. In the short term, our data will be useful for stakeholders, such as emergency managers, who will have access to our damage maps and surveys. Here we will share some preliminary results from our 2022 inaugural field program