LOCKED & LOADED
Pilot Brian Kindrat checks equipment on a plane at Springbank Airport that’s used to spray silver iodide and smoke particles into storm clouds in the hopes of reducing the formation of large hail stones. There have been 24 hail days so far this summer.
The hailstorms that regularly batter Alberta each summer are increasing in frequency and intensity and likely will continue to do so in years to come, according to the director of the province’s cloud seeding program.
Terry Krauss, project director for the Alberta Severe Weather Management Society, said the province has had 24 hail days so far this summer. Ten of those storms have produced walnut-sized hail, three have produced golf ball-sized hail, and one — the June 13 hailstorm that hammered Calgary and surrounding area, shredding siding off of homes and smashing car windows — produced larger than golf ball-sized hailstones.
“We’re having a large number of large hailstone days, but the total number of hail days so far is about average,” Krauss said. “But we’ve been very busy in July. We’ve had a cold, wet and stormy summer so far this year, and I’m hoping it stops.”
The society is a private, notfor-profit organization created and fully funded by the province’s insurance companies for the purposes of hail suppression and the reduction of property damage and insurance claims.
The society operates weather radar stations at the Olds-didsbury airport, three planes in Springbank and two in Red Deer. When a possible hailstorm is identified, its pilots fly into action to “treat” the clouds with silver iodide and smoke particles.
These chemicals form ice crystals that compete for moisture with existing ice crystals in the clouds. The idea is to convert what could have been large damaging hailstones into many smaller hailstones, or even rain.
Alberta is the only province that has such a program, but it also gets more hailstorms than anywhere else in the country.
“Hail alley is right here in central Alberta, and that’s why our project is here,” said Krauss, who lives in Red Deer. “Yes, it can hail anywhere in Canada, in every province — but not as frequently, and definitely not as frequent with severe hail.”
Krauss said there is Alberta Research Council data that estimates that the society’s cloud-seeding efforts are responsible for a 20 per cent reduction in intensity of the province’s severe thunderstorms. But many factors go into how successful each individual cloud-seeding effort is. The June 13 storm, for example, was caused by merging storm systems that also produced high winds.
“The storm was suppressed, but it couldn’t be eliminated,” Krauss said. “Cloud seeding doesn’t affect the wind speed, so that added immensely to the damage.”
The June 13 storm is estimated to have caused $1.7 billion in total economic losses and now ranks as the fourth most expensive natural disaster in Canadian history. Earlier this week, global credit rating agency DBRS Morningstar said the financial impact of the event should be manageable for most insurance companies. However, DBRS said climate change and the risk of more severe events in the future is something insurance companies are incorporating into their risk management plans.
“Increasing costs of severe weather events could make certain perils and regions of the country uninsurable,” DBRS said in a release.