Wind roared against the SUV’s windows as its tires sloshed through water dumped onto the road by the dow
npour. A horizon-wide funnel cloud loomed out the window, several miles away. Then came the loud metallic pings on t
he roof. First one, then another. Then it was too fast to count and too loud to hear much of anything else.
Hailstones were pelting down, and the car was driving toward them.
“How big are they?” meteorology professor Kelly Lombardo asked from the passenger seat.
“Probably no more than a nickel or dime, but they’re just flowing at 50 mph,” said fellow researcher Matthew Kumjian as he steered through the flooded road.
Lombardo and Kumjian are part of a team of about 60 researchers chasing hail across the Great Plains to bet
ter forecast an underappreciated hazard that causes about $10 billion a year in damage in the U.S. The researchers br
ciated Press journalists to observe the first-of-its kind project called ICECHIP, including trips into the heart of the sto
rms in fortified vehicles like the one driven by Kumjian.
The payoff is data that could improve hail forecasts. Kn
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owing what’s going on inside a storm is crucial to knowing what’s going to happen to people in its path, meteorologists said.
“We have a really tough time forecasting hail size,” said Northern Illinois University meteorology professor Vict
or Gensini, one of the project leaders. “All scientific experiments start with data gathering, and without that data we don’t know what we’re missing. And so that’s what this project is all about.”
Inside a hail storm
On this afternoon, Lombardo and Kumjian, Penn State University
professors who are married to each other, were negotiating rapid weather changes while collecting their data.
Minutes before the hail started, the couple were launching three-foot wide weather balloons designed to give sc
ientists a glimpse of what’s happening in the leading edge of the storm. A tornado in the distance was slowly getting closer.
Soon cell phones blared tornado alarms, and a nearby town’s storm sirens roared to life. The couple jump
d in the car and drove into a part of the storm where they could collect hail after it fell, the same stretch of flooded road where they encountered the 50 mph winds. A w
ind-meter protruding from the black SUV’s front captured data that was displayed on Lombardo’s laptop.