Project Grant 2410916

This Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation's Geosciences Program (CFDA 47.050) will support the "In-Situ Collaborative Experiment for the Collection of Hail in the Plains" (ICECHIP) field campaign. The $548,981 award will fund a collaborative research effort to improve radar detection and monitoring of hail, provide critical ground-truth information for materials science, and enhance the nation's capabilities to predict hailstorms and their impacts. Over a 4-year period, the University of Oklahoma will lead a multidisciplinary team in deploying a mobile network of advanced instrumentation, including radars, drones, and high-resolution cameras, to gather comprehensive observations of hailstorms, hailstones, and associated damage across the Front Range and Central Plains regions. This first-of-its-kind dataset will enable improvements to radar-based hail detection, hail models, and forecasting through diverse academic, government, private sector, and international partnerships. The project will also provide training opportunities for 32 undergraduate and 20 graduate students across 10 U.S. universities.