Research Highlights Rising Costs of Hail Damage Due to Climate Change

<figure> <img alt="a person moves damaged vinyl sheets" src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/09/gettyimages-161009677.jpg?quality=90&amp;strip=all&amp;crop=0,0,100,100" /> <figcaption> Kevin Ross removes damaged vinyl sheets from underneath his sister's mobile home in Watkins, Colorado. The trailer park was heavily damaged by hail and very strong winds. | Denver Post/Getty Images </figcaption> </figure> <p class="wp-block-paragraph"><em>This story was originally published by <a href="https://www.hcn.org/issues/58-10/hail-is-a-multibillion-dollar-problem-and-could-get-worse/">High Country News</a> and is reproduced here as part of the <a href="https://www.climatedesk.org/">Climate Desk</a> Collaboration.</em></p> <p class="wp-block-paragraph">At a specialized cold lab in Boulder, Colorado, atmospheric researcher Anthony Bernal Ayala slices hailstones with a band saw, revealing layers of icy growth. These layers indicate the conditions in which the hail formed: a clear layer signals slow freezing, while a cloudy layer indicates rapid freezing, trapping air bubbles. Bernal Ayala analyzes the crystalline structures, particles, and isotopes preserved in these layers.</p> <p class="wp-block-paragraph">“All that information can tell you a wonderful story of how the hailstone was growing, but nobody — not until now — was able to tap into that history,” said Bernal Ayala, who works for Atmospheric and Environmental Research, part of the JANUS Research Group.</p> <p class="wp-block-paragraph">Bernal Ayala’s research, conducted at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), is part of an effort to study one of the costliest weather hazards. Researchers hope their findings will help protect lives and property from hail that damages roofs, crops, and vehicles.</p> <p class="wp-block-paragraph">From 2023 to 2025, annual severe thunderstorm losses exceeded $50 billion nationwide, according to the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety, more than double the losses seen a decade earlier. Hail accounted for 60% to 80% of the damage.</p> <img alt="Bernal Ayala holds a 3D-printed replica of one of the largest hailstones in the ICECHIP archive" src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/09/hail-alley-58-10_2.webp?quality=90&amp;strip=all&amp;crop=0,0,100,100" title="Bernal Ayala holds a 3D-printed replica of one of the largest hailstones in the ICECHIP archive" /> <p class="wp-block-paragraph">In Colorado, a state prone to hail, hail is the primary factor driving up insurance premiums, and researchers expect larger, more damaging hailstones to become more common with climate change.</p> <p class="wp-block-paragraph">“It’s going to just keep getting costlier and costlier,” Bernal Ayala said.</p> <p class="has-drop-cap wp-block-paragraph">Even basic questions about hail have been hard to study. However, a resurgence in research, including the first major US field campaign to study hail in over 40 years, could help change that.</p> <p class="wp-block-paragraph">ICECHIP — the “In-situ Collaborative Experiment for the Collection of Hail In the Plains” — aims to improve forecasts, make warnings more precise, and help communities prepare. It received $11 million in funding from the National Science Foundation in 2024, just before cuts hit the foundation in 2025.</p> <p class="wp-block-paragraph">For six weeks in spring 2025, about 100 scientists and university students chased hailstorms across the Central Plains and Front Range, using radar trucks to track storms and drones for aerial footage. Researchers photographed hail with high-speed cameras, measured its impact with a disdrometer, recorded hail distribution and size based on imprints on foam pads, captured it in specialized funnels, and crushed it to test its strength.</p> <p class="wp-block-paragraph">Scientists from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology also released golf ball-sized sensors into storms. Each probe collected data on speed and ice growth; a microphone recorded water droplets and hailstones hitting it.</p> <p class="wp-block-paragraph">“This has really been the first time where we’ve been able to do a real comprehensive look at hail on the ground, hail aloft, the storm itself, the environment around the storm — just everything all at once,” said Becky Adams-Selin, ICECHIP’s lead investigator and a principal scientist at Atmospheric and Environmental Research, JANUS Research Group.</p> <p class="has-drop-cap wp-block-paragraph">ICECHIP’s samples were packed into cooler-sized boxes and brought to NCAR, which has been used to study hail for decades. In the 1970s, the US investigated claims that it could suppress hail.</p> <p class="wp-block-paragraph">Researchers say there’s no other US lab like it; the backup plan to store ICECHIP’s samples involved using a walk-in freezer from a fast-food restaurant.</p> <p class="wp-block-paragraph">Now NCAR’s future is uncertain: In late 2025, the Trump administration announced plans to dissolve the center and transfer its work out of state. The University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), which manages NCAR, sued the administration in March, alleging it’s targeting NCAR due to Colorado's mail-in voting system and the governor's refusal to release a former clerk imprisoned for election security breaches.</p> <p class="wp-block-paragraph">In June, a federal judge temporarily blocked the White House from dismantling NCAR. The government has until September 30 to respond to the lawsuit.</p> <p class="wp-block-paragraph">“I can’t even quantify the impact that it would have to our community if we lost NCAR,” Victor Gensini, professor of meteorology at Northern Illinois University, told HCN. “They are the beating heart.”</p> <p class="has-drop-cap wp-block-paragraph">Previous research has predicted climate change’s effects on hail, noting that warmer temperatures could melt smaller hailstones before they land but also fuel stronger updrafts, allowing hailstones to grow bigger and become more common.</p> <p class="wp-block-paragraph">A record-setting stone recovered in Yuma County, Colorado, in 2023 measured more than 5 inches across. That year, the state logged 176 reports of hail 2 inches or greater, surpassing the previous record of 91 reports in 2018, according to the Colorado Climate Center.</p> <img alt="photographs of hailstones" src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/09/hail-alley-58-10_5.webp?quality=90&amp;strip=all&amp;crop=0,0,100,100" title="photographs of hailstones" /> <p class="wp-block-paragraph">Scientists say it’s difficult to know how much of the rise in damage is due to the increase in large hail versus the increased development in hail hotspots. The connection between a growing human footprint and higher insured losses has been dubbed the “expanding bull’s-eye effect.”</p> <p class="wp-block-paragraph">Gensini, a principal ICECHIP investigator, cites the development boom east of the Front Range, along Colorado’s Interstate 25 corridor, which has grown rapidly in recent decades. The population of the Fort Collins metro area alone has doubled since 1990 to around 375,000 residents, according to the US Census Bureau.</p> <p class="wp-block-paragraph">This trend is occurring across the Western US, as previously rural areas become densely populated, increasingly expensive targets for hail.</p> <p class="wp-block-paragraph">“Colorado is the poster child for what I expect the next 25 years to look like for hail,” Gensini said.</p> <p class="has-drop-cap wp-block-paragraph">In 2019, Fort Collins became one of the first cities to adopt hail-specific roofing requirements for new builds and remodels. Marcus Coldiron, the city’s chief building official, said it was partly in response to the materials taken to the landfill after a catastrophic hailstorm in 2018.</p> <p class="wp-block-paragraph">It’s still unclear how well the requirements are working: Coldiron noted fewer permits for roof replacements and fewer shingles going to the dump. However, Fort Collins has not experienced a hailstorm as devastating as the one in 2018.</p> <p class="wp-block-paragraph">A growing number of Front Range communities now require impact-resistant shingles in their building codes, and Colorado legislators recently passed a law offering grants to residents who install more resilient roofing.</p> <p class="wp-block-paragraph">ICECHIP’s researchers are also investigating how to improve building materials as billion-dollar losses from single storms become more common.</p> <p class="wp-block-paragraph">“The dollars are simply piling up so fast,” said Ian Giammanco, a lead research meteorologist at the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety, one of ICECHIP’s key partners. “We’re still trying to understand how do we get the best materials onto roofs, onto people’s homes, onto businesses to actually start shaving off these losses.”</p> <p class="wp-block-paragraph"></p>