Meet the weather detectives trying to decipher why hail is becoming a bigger problem

Forget twisters. These storm chasers are after a sneakier hazard: hail.

A team of about 70 researchers, armed with high-tech sensors and specially outfitted vehicles, set out across the nation this spring and summer to chase dozens of thunderstorms, hoping to unravel the remaining mysteries of how hail forms, whether hail storms are getting bigger in a warming climate and how to prevent damage.

Hail is a leading cause of storm damage in the U.S. and was responsible for tens of billions in property losses last year, according to Gallagher Re, a global reinsurance firm that tracks such data. Some previous modeling research suggests that the frequency of large hailstones striking the earth will increase with climate change.

The federally funded project, known as ICECHIP, is the first comprehensive field study of hail in four decades. It’s meant to fill in critical gaps in hail forecasting capabilities: connecting a storm’s complex, internal dynamics to the amount and the size of hail it will produce. That data could help modelers develop better predictors of storm damage, as well as aid in developing building materials, like roofing, that can stand up to hailstones.

“We know that hail might happen today, but we don’t know when, we don’t know where, and we don’t really know which of those storms is going to make 1-inch hail or 4-inch hail,” said Joshua Wurman, a top academic storm chaser at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, who is deploying the mobile radars for ICECHIP. “And there’s a huge difference to people on the ground, to crops, to cars, to roofs.”