Description
Hailstorms inflict significant economic damage, primarily through property and crop losses. This dataset tracks the historical baseline rate of hail storms across the globe for terrestrial regions, providing valuable insights for understanding and mitigating the impact of hail events. This information is crucial for assessing property risk, informing insurance pricing, guiding infrastructure design, and optimizing agricultural practices.
Technical Description
The global Hail Historical Baseline (v1) dataset estimates the annual frequency of severe hailstorm occurrence, as retrieved from satellite-borne passive microwave imagery from the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) and the Global Precipitation Measurement Mission (GPM). These data products can be useful for weather and climatological research related to storms, as well as applications involving risk management and emergency management. This data is derived from the multi-frequency (37 GHz and 19 GHz) passive microwave estimation of the probability of hail, accumulated across TRMM and GPM and normalized for overpass counts (Bang and Cecil, 2019; Bang and Cecil, 2021).
Between 39 degrees north and south latitudes, the data are sourced from combining both the normalized TRMM and GPM hail probabilities and overpass counts. Beyond 39 degrees, data are solely from the GPM satellite.
In these data, values over oceans are masked, and the risk class layer is calculated using percentiles of terrestrial values only.