Abstract

Measuring Hail, Wind, Ground-Truth to Facilitate Rapid Response
Track: Real-Time and Big Data
Authors: Alex Kubicek, Nicole Homeier, Nicole Homeier

Severe thunderstorms bring hail and wind damage, but current ground-truth infrastructure is poor at tracking and predicting where damage occurred. We are mostly reliant on radar and spotter reports to identify damaged areas. The potential applications of measuring hail and wind in a dense network is vast, ranging from rapid response of emergency personnel, to more effective staging of insurance catastrophe response teams, to short-term wind forecasting for utility outages.