In an article by The Weekly Planet, Alex Kubicek says that “Hail is expanding its footprint across the country at the same time that it is becoming more frequent in the central United States.”

Who is Alex Kubicek? His Twitter feed says – Weather guy, CEO of @UnderstoryWx, Board gamer.

In August of 2021, Wealth & Finance, an international monthly publication dedicated to delivering high quality informative and up-to-the-minute global business content recognized Understory Inc with  top honor of Best Climate Change Insurance Solution 2021 for their work rewriting insurance for the era of climate change.

In layman terms. Alex Kubicek is a super, hard-core weather geek.

When scientists and climatologists list climate change’s biggest (or extreme) threats –  fire, floods, heat waves, & drought are at the top. With occurrences of hail increasing in spread and severity, hail is on its way to making that list.

Changes in Climate Extremes and their Impacts on the Natural Physical Environment white paper defines An Extreme Weather Event as, “the occurrence of a value of a weather or climate variable above (or below) a threshold value near the upper (or lower) ends (‘tails’) of the range of observed values of the variable.” Source.

How much money does hail damage cause per year in the United States?

The catastrophic effects of extreme hail occurrences include:

Crop Damage – Hail annually causes billions of dollars in damage worldwide to crops and property combined.

Personal Property Damage – In 2019, over 7.1 million US properties were affected by hail damage. Between 2008 and 2014, US insurers paid roughly $5.37 billion for auto insurance claims, according to hail data. The highest claim frequency was recorded in 2011 with 4.3 claims per 1,000 insured automobiles in the US due to hail damage. Source.

How do these hail occurrences effect personal property?

From damaged roofs, and personal property damage to hail damaged vehicles  – insurance companies are paying out millions per year to repair the effects of hail damage. We know this.

The problem though is how many of these hail damage claims are actually legitimate?

It works kind of like this. A hail storm hits a portion of Austin, Texas. Not the entire city but more like a span of approximately 25 city blocks. Within those 25 blocks are residential neighborhoods, a couple of car lots, and a shopping center.

How do these hail occurrences effect property and casualty insurance companies?

After a hail storm, it is common for local or out-of-town roofing contractors to visit these neighborhoods and distribute sales paraphernalia in hopes of earning the contract to repair the hail damaged roofs. The same goes for paintless dent repair companies.

The problem is that not every roof or vehicle has the same severity of damage. Insurance fraud is a significant problem after major storms, partly because crooked contractors deceive customers about the extent of roof damage.

“If there is a high rate of weather related home damage or claims being filed in your neighborhood, your insurer will raise the rates for the entire area. This rate increase will affect your premiums regardless of whether or not you recently filed a claim.” Source.

How do these hail occurrences effect people?

“We really don’t know a lot about how the weather affects people. There has to be a better way to understand the weather than what we’re doing,” says Kubicek.

Kubieck’s company Uderstory is seeking to find a better way to detect the actual effect each unique hail occurrence can have on a farmers crops, a personals personal property, their vehicles, etc.  This, in turn, will better help property and casualty insurance adjusters understand just how much damage was sustained based on scientific data.

What does this mean?

Understory has developed what is called an “unmatched hyperlocal network” of ground-level sensors spaced two miles apart throughout a city or other area. Each sensor measures wind, rain and hail by force, direction and angle of impact, 120,000 times a second. That data allows analysts to precisely estimate storm damage, he said. Source.

With this technology, insurance estimators can go into a hail storm damaged area with an understanding of how much damage they should expect to see. If a roofing company or a paintless dent repair company has already estimated the cost to repair the damaged sustained on a roof or vehicle before the insurance estimator has actually seen the damage, they can quickly determine if their estimate is within the range of the data they have received from the sensors.

If a contractors estimate is grossly inflated, the insurance adjuster can visit the property to re-evaluate the damage and deliver a reimbursement amount that more accurately reflects the damage.

Ultimately, this technology will prevent the insured from incurring a cost increase on their property and casualty insurance and vehicle insurance policies.

Hail Sensors in Hail Alley

Currently, there are over 600 sensors placed strategically across hail alley. Understory has installed sensors in Dallas-Fort Worth, Denver, Houston, Kansas City, and St. Louis – all producing what Kubicek calls “litigation-quality data” with a 97% accuracy rate that can hold up in court.

The insurer hopes that the data obtained from the sensor will help to more effectively handle future claims.

You’ve just had the hail damage repaired on your vehicle and you are ready to get it back to looking new again. Follow these simple steps to properly wash your car like the pro’s at The Hail Shop USA.

Gather the materials you will need to wash your car.

• • A pressure washer, car wash nozzle or a garden hose spray nozzle. 
  • 2 Heavy duty buckets. You can pick-up a 5 gallon bucket at your local hardware store for under five bucks. You’ll use one for soapy water and one as a dirty rinse bucket. It is also great for storing your car washing gear.
  • A sponge.
  • Microfiber wash brush, microfiber applicator, and microfiber cloths. Microfiber will both remove dirt and wick away water simultaneously. Plus, it reduces friction between the towel and your car for a safer way to dry without scratching.
  • Streak-free window glass cleaner.
  • Car washing foam. Car washing foam eliminates dirt, grime and environmental contaminants with massive amounts of dirt fighting, sudsy foam. We like this one sold on Amazon
  • Butter wet wax.

Wash your car like a champion

1. Spray down the vehicle. Use a pressure washer, car wash nozzle or a garden hose with a spray nozzle (wide spray setting) to rinse most of the dirt, grime, and grit off the entire exterior panels.
2. Start at the top. Use your microfiber wash brush and extremely sudsy water with your car washing foam to clean the vehicle. Use a side-to-side motion, never circular motions. Start at the roof and then the hood, and then work your way down. After you wash a panel, make sure you rinse your microfiber wash brush in your dirty water bucket to remove any sentiment to avoid scratching your paint.
3. Wash and then rinse. Repeat. After each individual panel is washed, rinse it to avoid soap streaking. Empty your dirty water bucket between every other panel you’ve washed.
4. Wash the wells. Dust, debris, and dirt love to live in your door wells and crevices so do not forget to wash them. Use a sponge to clean these areas.
5. Don’t air dry, hand dry. When you leave a car to dry naturally, it can result in a streaky finish. To avoid streaking, make sure to dry each panel using a microfibre cloth or towel. If you have a leaf blower handy, this can be a great tool to blow out in between the wells. If you don’t, use an old towel to wipe these areas dry.
6. Clean the glass. Give both the exterior and interior glass a good cleaning with your steak-free glass cleaner. Use a clean microfiber towel to clean all glass and windows.
   

   Pro-tip: Designate washing zones by color coding your microfiber cloths. For example, use only blue microfiber cloths to clean glass. Use orange for interior detailing and yellow for exterior detailing.

7. Wax and polish. Once the car is clean, waxing the with Butter Wet Wax will help it look even better, protect the paint from ultraviolet rays, and adds a protective barrier from the elements.

The nations #1 provider of Paintless Dent Repair & Auto Hail Repair.

If your vehicle has hail damage, Auto Hail Repair with the professionals at The Hail Shop USA.

Features on land and in the atmosphere make perfect hail conditions for this part of the U.S.

In this article, we will explore how climate change could effect three of the hardest hit states that reside in the path of Hail Alley.

How will Climate Change effect Kansas?

Temperature

Kansas’s climate is changing. In the past century, most of the state has warmed by at least half a degree (F). The soil is becoming drier.

Rain / Snow

Climate change is creating an “unprecedented” risk of severe drought in the Southwest and Central Plains. Rising temperatures and decreasing rainfall mean that future drought could be more extreme than any drought seen in at least the past 1,000 years and the effects could reverberate for urban dwellers and farmers across the regions.

Winters

Warming winters and changes in the timing and size of rainfall events have altered crop yields. Over the next several decades, the amount of rainfall during the wettest days of the year is likely to continue to increase, which would increase flooding.

Hail Occurrences

The environmental conditions for large hail development are not changing with climate warming and that all favorable environments are equally likely to produce large hail.

Resources: Climate Central,

How will Climate Change effect Colorado?

Temperature

The climate of the Intermountain West is changing, with multiple independent measurements indicating an overall warming of about 2°F across the region in the past 30 years.  In 2020, Colorado experienced its seventh warmest year in more than a century of record-keeping. Average temperatures were 2.8 degrees higher than the average in the past century. 2016 through 2020 was the hottest-ever five-year period for the state, according to the NOAA’s National Center for Climate Information.

Rain / Snow

Coloradans are experiencing what is called a  “snow drought.”  This is what Colorado forecasters are talking about when they say snow cover across the West is lower than at any time over the past two decades. Snowpack is less than 80% of normal statewide with less than two months to keep building.

Hail Occurrences

The effects of climate change on hail and the resulting damage are hard to calculate because hailstorms require distinct ingredients, and global warming affects them in different ways.

To form, hailstorms require moisture, an updraft, variable winds and freezing temperatures at lower levels of the storm cloud.

Updrafts lift water droplets into the clouds, where they attract other droplets and freeze together, scientists say. Winds of varying speed and direction keep the droplets suspended in the cloud long enough to grow into hailstones. When they eventually fall, freezing temperatures in the cloud keep them from melting before they hit warmer air closer to the ground.

Climate change will likely increase updrafts, helping hailstones form, but it will inhibit two hail-producing conditions. Warmer temperatures will expand higher into the atmosphere, so falling hailstones have more time to melt before hitting the ground. And differences in wind speed and direction will subside.

Climate change will make the atmosphere moister, but the effect that will have on hailstones isn’t clear..

Resources: CPR, Andreas Prein – National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. Colorado Sun,

How will Climate Change effect Texas?

Temperature

Texas is home to 9 of the hottest cities in the U.S., with McAllen in the 2nd slot. Most of the state of Texas has warmed between one-half and one degree (F) in the past century. Texas is home to 9 of the hottest cities in the U.S., with McAllen in the 2nd slot.

Rain

Despite the increase in heavy storms, changing climate is likely to make water less available overall. As warmer temperatures increase evaporation and water use by plants, soils are likely to continue to become drier. Average rainfall is likely to decrease during winter, spring, and summer. Seventy years from now, the longest period without rain each year is likely to be at least three days longer than it is today. Increased evaporation and decreased rainfall are both likely to reduce the average flow of rivers and streams.

Snow

In the case of the Texas cold snap, the phenomenon began in the first week of January 2021, when air in the stratosphere above the Arctic warmed suddenly. This set up a slow-moving atmospheric chain reaction that weakened the polar vortex, the girdle of winds that keeps frigid air corralled at the North Pole, allowing it to spill out into the temperate regions of Asia, Europe, and North America. Once the cold starts rolling south, very little can stop it.

While these events happen about six times per decade, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Cohen maintains that climate change has increased the frequency with which the polar vortex weakens and allow the cold to air to run amok.

Hail Occurrences

Based on research, there is some indication of more intense hailstorms in a warming climate. Since the 1960s, the annual number of reported hail observations has risen, both in frequency and the size of the hailstones. That rising trend, however, does not necessarily mean climate change is resulting in more hailstorms with larger hail, and could simply indicate that as populations grow, there are more people, living in more areas, able to send in hail reports.

Resources: Bloomberg,  AMS,  EPA.gov