Cloud seeding crews help prevent Tuesday’s hailstorm from being worse

As intense as the hailstorm was in Calgary on Tuesday afternoon, it could’ve been much worse, weather officials say.

As the storm clouds developed, air crews from the Alberta Severe Weather Management Society were cloud seeding, which helps prevent hail from getting too big and instead forms smaller pellets and ice crystals.

Society project director Terry Krause said the conditions were ripe for hail.

“We did have three aircraft on those two severe cells that tracked across Calgary and it was seeded,” he said. “The majority of the hail was a lot of pea and grape-sized, there were confirmed reports of loonie or toonie-sized.”

“There’s more forecast for today, it’s a major, upper-level low pressure system and we’re out in front of it and when the upper level winds are strong, it helps generate long-lasting, severe storms that tilt over and can have strong wind and it’s conducive to the growth of hail, lots of it,” he explained.

Krause’s team has seeded 68 storms on 22 days with a month left in the season and they average 30 seeded days.

As the society keeps an eye on the sky, Insurance Bureau of Canada Director of Government Relations Heather Mack said insurers are doing the same on the ground.

“From what I saw just even on social media last night, it was a pretty spectacular storm pretty quick, so insurers are already out responding to a lot of those claims,” she said, adding hailstorms have clearly been on the rise over the last few years.

“It’s hard to tell why this is happening, some climatologists say that just with warmer weather, we’ll see more severe hailstorms like this,” Mack said. “We’re also seeing, not always at the scale that we saw yesterday and we saw last year in Airdrie, but we’re seeing small pockets of very severe hail and it is just becoming life on the prairies.”

Last summer’s Airdrie storm was the biggest in Canadian history with damages at $568 million.

It’s too early to tell what damages will total for this storm, especially if more hail comes down Wednesday, but Mack said like any storm, there are several possible claims.

“If a vehicle gets flooded to a certain point, it’s not driveable on Alberta roads anymore, so there’s a potential that some cars may have to be written off from that perspective, certainly wind damage, there will be some siding and roof damage,” she said, adding it’s the latest of the intense weather across the prairies.

“Tornadoes touched down in Manitoba, the tornado scare in Calgary, wildfires in B.C., it’s been pretty wild this year,” she said.