19 new monitoring stations in Calgary to aid defense against hailstorms - Action News
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Calgary

19 new monitoring stations in Calgary to aid defense against hailstorms

Summer afternoon hailstorms are a part of life in Calgary. Its why a team of researchers have installed a network of sophisticated weather stations across the city to study the storms that regularly pummel buildings and cars sometimes causing tremendous damage.

Researchers say data will improve forecasting, help mitigate damage

Research team brings Canada's first hail-monitoring network to Calgary

1 year ago
Duration 1:02
The Northern Hail Project installed 19 weather stations with hail-detecting technology throughout Calgary. The goal is to gather data to help improve forecasts and warnings.

Summer afternoon hailstorms are a part of life in Calgary.

It's why a team of researchers from Ontario have installed a network of sophisticated weather stations across the city to study the storms that regularly pummel buildings and cars sometimes causing tremendous damage.

The Northern Hail Project, a spinoff of the Northern Tornado Project, recently finished installing 19 state-of-the-art weather stations across Calgary, as well as one in Airdrie, just north of the city.

Julian Brimelow, the project's executive director, said this is the only hail-focused network of research stations in Canada,among only a handful of others across the globe.

"They haven't been out here very long, but they've already captured numerous hailstorms over Calgary," he said. "The summer has been quite busy."

The weather stations track all the basic weather data, such as temperature and wind speed, but they're also equipped withdisdrometers, which look like round metal plates, that use extremely sensitive microphones to record impacts from hailstones.

"It's not interested in rain, it just records hail," Brimelow said. "It also gives us an estimate of each of those impacts, how big the hail was."

A computer-generated map of Calgary showing dots across the city where weather stations are placed.
This map shows the 19 disdrometer-equipped weather stations across Calgary. The Northern Hail Project has placed other such stations across Alberta's 'hail alley,' in Airdrie, Carstairs and Olds. (Northern Hail Project)

This ground-level information will be compared to radar data, allowing researchers to learn more about how hailstorms function, which could lead to better forecasting, more accurate warningsand less damageto homes, cars and crops across Canada.

Ultimately, Brimelow said, the group's goal is to use this knowledge to help craft building codes that could create more resilient communities, designed to better withstand powerful hailstorms.

"Having these ground truth data is really important toward achieving that," he said.

'Hail alley'

To learn about how damaging hail can be, the research group chases storms across Alberta's "hail alley" to find the largest hailstones.

Hail alley,Brimelow explained,is a narrow band east of the Rocky Mountains, extending fromnorthwest of Edmonton, along the foothills to south of Calgary.

Francis Lavigne-Theriault, a research associate for the Northern Hail Project, uses drones to capture high-resolution images of fallen hail immediately following a storm.

A photograph of the largest hailstone recorded in Canada.
An image of the largest hailstone recorded in Canada. Researcher Francis Lavigne-Theriault found it while chasing a storm near Markerville, Alta., last year. (Francis Lavigne-Theriault)

Last August, a team led by Lavigne-Theriaul found the largest hailstone recorded in Canadian history. It was near Markerville, Alta., roughly 130 kilometres north of Calgary,

The stone was 12 centimetres in diameter, larger than the span of a DVD disc, and weighed 292 grams, roughly the heft of a tennis racket.

Researchers keep the stone in a freezer at Western University. There, they make replicas of large hailstones to drop from drones to simulatefall speeds, a key factor in understanding the damage large hail can cause in severe storms.

More destructive hailstorms seen across the world

Joshua Soderholm, a research scientist from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, is in Alberta this summer to test hail measurement devices alongside the Canadian researchers.

He says destructive hailstorms are becoming more common across the globe as increasingly warm and humid weather sets the stage for storms to produce larger, more destructive hail.

The devices Soderholm is testing in Alberta are shaped like small hailstones. Balloons drop them into storm clouds, where they float and swirl among the developing hail, measuring the conditions inside the storm.

"There is no other way to get this data," Soderholm said, noting the devices can be reused once they drop out of the sky.

"For us, these devices are giving us new and exciting information on the conditions inside a thunderstorm, where hail is growing."

Hail and flooding against a landscape of homes in northeast Calgary.
This image shows some of the damage from the major hailstorm that pounded homes, vehicles and crops across parts of southern Alberta on June 13, 2020. (Jeff McIntosh/The Canadian Press)

In June 2020, the most costly hailstorm in Canada's history struck northeast Calgary, resulting in roughly $1.4 billion in damage and 70,000 insurance claims.

According to Brimelow, one such billion-dollarstormhappens across the globe every year. But with climate change, the conditions become more likely forsevere stormsto develop on steamy summer daysin Alberta's hail alley.

"The insured losses from hail have been increasing dramatically across the world," he said. "We started seeing evidence of that in the U.S., but now we're seeing it increasing in too many places to be a coincidence. We're seeing trends in Europe, Australia and now in Canada."

The Northern Hail Project hopes to have Calgary's weather station network in place for at least a few years. Data from the stations is recorded in real-time and sent via the cell network to a server in Ontario every 10 minutes.

The research team is developing a portal so the public can view the data.

With files from Terri Trembath, Laurence Brisson Dubreuil