Building A 20-Year Hail Damage Swath Events Database Using Satellite Remote Sensing

Abstract:

Each growing season, intense thunderstorms can produce damaging winds and large hail across agricultural areas. In certain cases, these intense thunderstorms leave behind visible swaths of damage, sometimes, hundreds of kilometers long and tens of kilometers wide over near mature agricultural crops. Unlike, tornadoes in the United States, where formal ground surveys are conducted to confirm the number of, the length, width, and other statistics of the damage; there is no formal database or climatology of hail damage swaths. Because hail is one of the costliest natural disasters, especially for agricultural crops, the need for a dataset is that can help to inform stakeholders on past events, as well as potentially provide information for about risk planning and the annual threat to agricultural areas going forward. Because hail damage swaths are frequently visible from outer space, satellite remote sensing instruments are frequently used to observe them over the last few decades. Many of these instruments have extensive periods of records, making it possible to go back into time to assemble a database of hail damage swaths.

Using NASA’s Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument, work is underway to start developing a 20-year hail damage swath events database for the Central United States. This database will initially provide associated metadata for when the damage swath appeared relative to the intense storms that produced the damage, with additional information about atmospheric conditions that may reveal clues about annual variability. This presentation will focus discussing the methodology for creating, populating the database, and initial analysis of the database. The presentation will close with highlighting the work that is still left to be done to complete the database.