4,- 1Central Michigan University, Department of Earth & Atmospheric Sciences, Mt Pleasant, United States of America (johnterrallen@gmail.com)
- 2Atmospheric Environmental Research
- 3Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, IL, United States of America
- 4NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO, United States of America
- *A full list of authors appears at the end of the abstract
Hail is the leading driver of severe convective storm losses in the United States and globally, with early estimates though June in 2025 approaching 20 billion dollars insured loss in the U.S. alone. Despite this impact, many questions remain unanswered within hail science, ranging from hailstone properties to swath properties, to environmental drivers and storm kinematic and microphysical structures and how these can be remotely sensed. To address this gap the In Situ Collaborative Experiment for the Collection of Hail in the Plains (ICECHIP) campaign was conducted between May 15 and June 28th of 2025. Active periods of convection persisted throughout the campaign yielding over 20 intensive observation periods.
ICECHIP field assets included over 100 ground deployable instruments, multiple atmospheric profiling systems, mobile doppler radars with a team of 15 institutions and 6 countries. Numerous cases ranging from accumulating small to storms with hail in excess of 75mm were sampled, with the largest hailstone observed >140mm and weighing 462 grams. ICECHIP addressed observations necessary for 5 major research themes: 1) embryo development and hailstone growth and fall behavior; 2) in-storm hail trajectory and convective updraft relationships; 3) environmental impacts on hail processes and predictability; 4) surface properties of hailstones and associated impacts; and 5) relationship of hailstone physical properties and growth processes to radar observations.
This presentation will focus on an overview of major project cases and preliminary significant findings. Examples of the data collected include ground observed arrays at horizontal resolutions of a few hundred meters across hailswaths, updraft measurements of both supercell and non-supercellular hail producing storms, dual-doppler and high-resolution radar coverage overlapping detailed ground mapping, and numerous examples of near storm environmental profiles.
John Allen, Rebecca Adams-Selin, Victor Gensini, Andy Heymsfield, Ian Giammanco, Karen Kosiba, Matt Kumjian, Josh Wurman, Kelly Lombardo, Katja Friedrich, Daniel Dawson, Xingchao Chen, Jason Keeler, Julian Brimelow, Dan Dawson, Conrad Ziegler, Hannah Vagasky, Ted Mansell, Russ Schumacher, Zach Lebo, Cameron Homeyer, V. Chandrasekar, Justin Dodd, Loren White, Yongli Gao, Joshua Solderholm, Olivia Romppainen-Martius, Alain Protait
How to cite: Allen, J., Adams-Selin, R., Gensini, V., and Heymsfield, A. and the ICECHIP Science PIs: Overview of the In Situ Collaborative Experiment for the Collection of Hail in the Plains (ICECHIP), 12th European Conference on Severe Storms, Utrecht, The Netherlands, 17–21 Nov 2025, ECSS2025-309, https://doi.org/10.5194/ecss2025-309, 2025.
