Alberta’s hail-fighting pilots prevented an average of three storms a day from delivering huge hail this summer — one of their busiest years ever.
The Alberta Severe Weather Management Society’s team of 11 pilots, aided by three meteorologists on the ground, flies directly into the fiercest storm cells to break up hail. Their efforts often save Albertans — and their insurance companies — from dealing with the havoc wreaked by the most threatening storms.
“It’s the exact opposite of what you learn as a pilot,” said Jordy Fischer, chief pilot for Weather Management Inc., which is contracted by the ASWMS.
Fisher and his team spend their summers flying into thunderstorms, firing silver iodide flares into the clouds where hail forms.
Hail forms when small ice particles are held aloft for a long time, allowing them to grow. They fall to earth either when the updraft holding it there weakens, the hailstone becomes too heavy or it moves into a downdraft.
In southern Alberta, that can lead to hailstones the size of golf balls, like the ones that caused millions of dollars worth of damage in Calgary in 2012. And this summer, the province’s farmers were on track to break the record set for crop insurance claims in 2012.
But silver iodide mimics ice crystals, allowing them to grow into small hailstones. In the end, there are more of them, but the hailstones that fall to earth are smaller and less damaging.
Fischer and his fellow pilots don’t fly directly into the deadly centres of storms, but rather, the edges.
“A thunderstorm is like a massive vacuum,” he said.
“We have to go where the storm is drawing air in.”
Depending on the type of seeding they’re doing, that can be either a bumpy, perilous experience or a quiet one.
“(Flying under a storm) is really ominous because you’re under the cloud and it’s dark, you may need the lights on in the plane,” he said. “Really slow, quiet, eerie and ominous.”
But top seeding requires pilots to go inside the clouds, where updrafts and downdrafts make it feel more like a roller coaster, he said.
The insurance industry invests about $6 million in the hail suppression project per year. But over the last five years, insurers paid out nearly $2 billion in claims from hail damage, the Insurance Bureau of Canada estimates.
It’s hard to judge how much money the Alberta Severe Weather Management Society, which contracts U.S.-based Weather Modification Inc. for the seeding, saves insurers, project director Terry Knauss said.But radar imaging shows that the process is effective at diminishing the intensity of storms.
“Reducing the hail damage by only a few percent more than pays for the program,” Knauss said.
And the team is certainly working. Knauss said the team’s five planes have spent over 220 hours in the air so far this summer, seeding 69 storms in 23 days.
