NIU meteorologist joins $11M national hailstorm study

DeKALB – A Northern Illinois University weather researcher, whose forecasts are regularly used by storm chasers across the U.S., will help lead a study for scientists to better understand hailstorms, impacts and their role in severe weather patterns.

Victor Gensini is a certified consulting meteorologist at NIU’s Department of Earth, Atmosphere and Environment in DeKalb. He regularly teaches a mixture of meteorology courses as an associate professor at NIU. Come mid-May, he’ll trade the classroom for a hand in an $11 million National Science Foundation-backed field study. He won’t be alone either.

“These types of experiments for scientists are generally once in a career,” Gensini said. “This will be certainly a career defining experiment for me, but also for many of the participants that will be taking part in it, including NIU students and almost a dozen other universities.”

The research project is called “In-situ Collaborative Experiment for Collection of Hail In the Plains,” or ICECHIP. The work will send about 100 researchers into severe weather with the hope of better understanding hailstorms.

The collaboration is expected to be the first large scale, U.S.-based hail research project recorded in more than 40 years. While overall project costs top out at $11 million, NIU was awarded $3.8 million for the project in 2024, according to the National Science Foundation.

U.S. Rep. Lauren Underwood, D-Naperville, helped researchers secure the federal funding for the project. In 2024, she was the ranking member of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security. In that role, she was partially in charge of distributing funds to agencies such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which responds to extreme weather events.

Gensini and NIU aren’t the only project leaders.

Becky Adams-Selin, a hail scientist at Atmospheric and Environmental Research; John Allen of Central Michigan University; and Andy Heymsfield of the National Center for Atmospheric Research also will lead the team of about 100 researchers into the field.

But why study hail? Gensini said he thinks hail is an underrated peril of a severe thunderstorm.

“I think perhaps the ‘sexiest’ peril from thunderstorms would be a tornado,” Gensini said. “I think that’s the peril that many people are probably most scared of or worried about, but hail causes way more damage than tornadoes across the continental U.S. every year.”

Hail damage has caused an estimated $10 billion in insured losses annually over the past 14 years before accounting for agricultural losses, according to NIU.

Researchers also hope to better understand five key components of hailstorms: hailstone growth and fall behavior; in-storm hail trajectory and convective updraft relationships; environmental impacts of hail processes; the dynamic between the surface properties of hailstones and storm characteristics; and the relationship between hailstone growth and radar observations.

Research will last six weeks, from the middle of May until the end of June. But where exactly Gensini will be is still up in the air, he said.

“[We’ll] be roaming all over the Great Plains, or even the Midwest, potentially Illinois, wherever thunderstorms are, wherever we think the conditions are going to be favorable for hail,” Gensini said.

Researchers will have a slew of equipment to work with while storm chasing, including mobile doppler radars, weather balloons, drones, surface hail pads, and other instruments that can help them understand the kinetic energy of falling hail.

While researchers will have modern gadgets to gather data with, Gensini said he’s been working with the NIU College of Engineering and Engineering Technology to make a truck hail resistant.

“We’re trying to build a cage around the windows to be able to protect it from large hail, and just make it sort of tougher when we get closer to these storms,” Gensini said.