Allen Research Group
Hail - Tornadoes - Climate Variability - Extremes
Current Research Projects
Project: Collaborative Research: AGS-FIRP Track 3: In-situ Collaborative Experiment for the Collection of Hail In the Plains (ICECHIP)
Funding Agency: National Science Foundation
Funded Period: September 2024 - August 2028
Project Details
Hail is the most consistently damaging hazard of severe thunderstorms, producing losses in the U.S. alone exceeding $10s of billions per year over the past 14 years with impacts on homeowners, business owners, aviation, agriculture, transportation, and renewable energy producers. The In-situ Collaborative Experiment for Collection of Hail In the Plains field campaign, or ICECHIP, will improve radar detection and monitoring of hail, provide critical ground-truth information for materials science, and improve the nation's capabilities to predict hailstorms and their impacts. This large field project will bring together 10 US academic institutions, industry partners, government researchers from four countries and nearly 100 scientists to collect the first hail observations in the field in over 40 years. Mobile radars, unpiloted aerial systems, lofted drifters and probes, laser scanning technologies, high-resolution cameras, and more traditional field observations such as atmospheric conditions and surface hail size will all be used to obtain synchronized and comprehensive observations of hailstorms, the hailstones they produce, and the damage they cause. Researchers will deploy a fully mobile network for 6 weeks in Summer 2025 across the Front Range and Central Plains, gathering observations from a wide variety of hailstorms and hail types. At CMU research will focus on the observational data at the ground, and building critical data sources that will inform nearly all subsequent studies. 10 undegraduate and 5 graduate students will participate in the field effort, while 2 graduate students will work on projects to translate these observations into societally relevant outcomes.
