High Hail Costs: Ice storms create majority of insurance claims in US

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02:57

It's been a dramatic weather season, with hurricanes and tornadoes. But in the US, hailstorms continue to be a quiet, dangerous, AND costly force. The annual damage from these storms totals close to 10 billion dollars in the US alone. It's a global phenomenon that scientists are trying to better understand, even predict. CGTN's Hendrik Sybrandy reports from the US state of Colorado.

They're loud, pounding events that often leave a mark after they've come and gone. Experts say hailstorms account for 70 percent of all insured losses from severe storms although they don't always grab the headlines.

"It just doesn't get a lot of respect. It's not as flashy."

Ian Giammanco was among the hail experts who attended the recent North American Hail Workshop in Colorado. Here, the spotlight was back on a weather phenomenon that's gotten a lot of scientific attention in recent years.

ANDREAS PREIN PROJECT SCIENTIST, US NATIONAL CENTER FOR ATMOSPHERIC RESEARCH "Insurance losses went up heavily during the last ten years. This, of course, generated a lot of interest in hail research again."

Those increased losses are caused, in part, by bigger homes, costlier roofing materials and urban sprawl.

IAN GIAMMANCO INSURANCE INSTITUTE FOR BUSINESS & HOME SAFETY "So a big hailstorm comes along, you now damage a thousand homes whereas it would have just been open farmland or rural areas."

In fact, farmers are often affected by hail-related crop damage.

"Now we've reduced our income stream by potentially 75 percent."

HENDRIK SYBRANDYCOLORADO "Hailstorms are often described as golf ball-sized but in reality, they're often irregularly shaped because of the violent way they bounce around inside storms. In fact, the larger they are the less spherical they become."

KRISTEN RASMUSSEN DEPT. OF ATMOSPHERIC SCIENCE, COLORADO STATE UNIVERSITY "Our research shows that severe convective storms are becoming more frequent with the changes in climate."

Kristen Rasmussen with Colorado State University expects hail storms, which are fueled by a strong upward motion of air and lots of moisture, to intensify in a warming climate, particularly near the Rockies, Andes and Himalaya mountain ranges where they're most common. This conference of hail experts was aimed at preparing for that eventuality.

KRISTEN RASMUSSEN DEPT. OF ATMOSPHERIC SCIENCE, COLORADO STATE UNIVERSITY "With more research on hail and hail-producing storms we can have better forecast models, we can predict them better, we can give better warnings. We can also change maybe how our building materials are created to be more robust."

This fall, scientific work will be done in hail-prone Argentina on possible ways to actually reduce the size of hailstones.

ANDREAS PREIN PROJECT SCIENTIST, US NATIONAL CENTER FOR ATMOSPHERIC RESEARCH "I think there's a lot of things we can do in science to really mitigate these problems and to give early warnings and to really try to get the risk lower again."

Hail still remains mysterious in many ways. The need to better understand it, lower risks and manage losses is very real.

IAN GIAMMANCO INSURANCE INSTITUTE FOR BUSINESS & HOME SAFETY "Our cities, we're getting bigger, we have more people and hail storms aren't going away."

Hendrik Sybrandy, CGTN, Boulder, Colorado.