A Method for Estimating Crop Losses from Hail in Uninsured Periods and Regions

Abstract

Abstract The insurance industry, insurance regulatory bodies, and scientists investigating climate change all desire long records of hail losses. Existing loss records for some states cover the 1948–present period; this span is helpful but is not long enough to define trends, possible fluctuations, and extremes adequately. The only other hail data with much longer records are the frequencies of hail days collected at National Weather Service stations since 1901, and a newly developed database for the major hail-loss states that contains hail-day data for 910 cooperative stations for 1901–94. This study tested two methods for estimating the historical loss values using hail-day data; one method produced modified hail-day values found to relate closely to loss values in the nation’s 21 primary hail-loss states. The method involved modifying a station’s hail-day values for each of the crop-season months using insurance-derived monthly hail intensity indices, resulting in an annual hail-intensity-weighted val...