Drawing from extensive bodies of data and evidence compiled by a multitude of studies over the course of decades, insurance companies make carefully calculated decisions to as much as possible mitigate the potential for catastrophic losses.
After all, they very much have a vested interest in taking measures to reduce the odds of staring down astronomical stacks of claims caused by damages that could dramatically impact their bottom lines. To that end, insurance companies in Alberta have for decades kept alive a hail suppression program previously run by the provincial government.
“Cloud seeding is something that’s been around for probably 100 years now,” said Paul Kovacs, executive director of the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction (ICLR) at Western University in London, Ont.
“The earliest efforts on cloud seeding focused more on trying to affect rain, as opposed to hail,” said Kovacs, an economist by trade who is also a media liaison for the Alberta Severe Weather Management Society, a non-profit organization established by the province’s property and casualty insurers.
“The program in Alberta is focused on hail and not on rainfall,” he recently told the Albertan during a phone interview, adding that the dozens of other cloud seeding programs around the world are typically more focused on rain.
Formerly run by provincial government
The Alberta-based project started last century and was originally run by the provincial government for many years before an evaluation nearly three decades ago raised questions about the effectiveness and value of the program, he said.
“There wasn’t anybody saying anything bad was happening,” he said, explaining there simply was no concrete indications the program was worth the cost and that the provincial government ultimately decided to pull the plug.
Whether causally linked to that decision or simply a coincidental outcome, nature would later go onto leave an indelible mark.
“About 30 years ago, when Alberta stopped doing a government program to try to prevent hail damage through seeding, right after that there was a really bad storm that went through Calgary and did amazing damage – unprecedented damage in Calgary. At the time, it was the most destructive storm that had ever happened in the entire country,” he said.
“The people who got a large bill from that were insurance companies,” he said, adding the industry collaborated to lobby the government to restart the hail suppression program.
However, the provincial government of the day was not persuaded and did not reverse its decision, prompting the insurance sector to take the initiative, he said.
Insurance companies now foot the bill
Every year since, the insurance companies have outlined plans for monitoring efforts and operations conducted out of airports such as Springbank near Calgary as well as the Olds-Didsbury airport and annually receive a licence from the provincial government to proceed.
“All the bills now are paid by insurance companies and not paid by the government anymore; the government just sort of supervises the program,” he said.
But cloud seeding is not an exact science with global studies investigating how effective it is by and large producing inconclusive results that primarily indicate there are no adverse effects, he said.
“The impact on these big, complicated storms is small,” he said. “The question is: is this worth the money – is it doing something good?”
That being said, he added that even a minimal impact on reducing the size of hailstones can by extension potentially mitigate ensuing property damage. And despite global studies drawing uncertain conclusions, analyzing the body of data accumulated in the province over the span of decades has convinced insurance companies the program has value.
“We looked specifically at the Alberta program and what we found when we looked at the radar – when we looked at everything – when a storm is seeded, about 30 minutes later there seems to be less large hail,” he said.
Reducing the size of – not preventing – hail
“There’s not less hail – there’s still hail. But the really big hail seems to get smaller.”
Of course smaller hailstones naturally translate to reduced property damage, which makes a compelling case for insurance companies.
“They don’t want to spend money without a reason … even if fewer houses get hit and fewer cars get their windows damaged, a little bit is enough to pay for the cost of doing the program,” he said.
“The evidence that we found for the Alberta program is that the money spent results in avoided losses that are more than the money spent, and enough that almost all of the insurance companies and the province of Alberta put some money in and the planes are still flying.”
A U.S. company in North Dakota called Weather Modification International (WMI) that runs programs around the world has five planes involved in Alberta’s seasonal project, which is over for the year with operations set to resume in May 2025. Meteorologists stationed at airports such as Olds-Didsbury closely monitor the province’s weather and dispatch pilots when a significant enough storm manifests, with WMI sending a bill to the insurance companies afterwards, he said.
“There’s years like this year where even doing all of that, there was a lot of hail damage. But there’s a sense that it would have been worse if we weren’t seeding the clouds,” he said.
“No one involved in the program is saying, ‘If you have hail seeding, you’re going to have no damage.’ There’s no one who believes that,” he said. “But there’s a sense that a little bit less large hail is going to avoid more cost than not doing the hail seeding.”
Although no planes were based at the Olds-Didsbury airport during the 2024 hail suppression program, the company had a meteorologist stationed there to monitor radar, said Andrew Brice, WMI project manager and chief safety officer.
Program one-of-a-kind in Canada
Although there are similar programs around the world in places like Switzerland where efforts are focused on mitigating potential hail damage in Zurich by using a ground-based delivery method, the airborne project in Alberta is one-of-a-kind in Canada.
“It’s exclusive to Alberta – it’s the only place in Canada that had one in the past when the government was doing it and that has one now, when it’s being supported by the insurance companies,” said Kovacs.
But hail is known to present the potential to cause damage in other provinces such as Saskatchewan and Ontario as well as Manitoba, he said.
“It is a multi-province challenge. Alberta is a little bit unique because most of the damaging storms all come in a more predictable path,” he said, elaborating as to why there are no similar projects anywhere else in the country.
“There’s kind of a pathway out of the Rockies and if the storm comes from there, then it’s on its way to Calgary,” he said, adding there is generally a wide enough window of opportunity “to go out and meet it.”
That more predictable storm path pattern provides the province with an edge over the others.
“If you tried to take some of this approach and apply it to Regina or Saskatoon or Winnipeg, you’d have to be looking at a lot more places,” he said.
Seeding has limited impact on complicated storms
In light of misinformation circulating on social media platforms claiming that cloud seeding projects actually create storms, Kovacs noted that Alberta is not the only place in the world or even Canada that experiences significant hail storms, but is the only place in the country that pursues hail suppression efforts and that other provinces like Saskatchewan where there has never been any cloud seeding still get damaging hail storms.
“There were storms in Alberta when there were years when there was no seeding,” he said.
“There is hail damage in the United States that’s even on a larger scale than what’s experienced in Alberta,” he added. “You don’t have the biggest storm ever because you do seeding.”
Kovacs said ICLR collaborates closely alongside a team of scientists who are working on what’s known as the Northern Hail Project, a relatively new Canadian expansion to a counterpart in the U.S. called simply the Hail Project.
“Storms are really big, complicated things and meteorologists over more than 100 years still are learning why does the storm start, why does it get big, why does this storm have hail and that one not have hail?” he said.
“There’s a lot we still don't know.”
New studies to shed more light
The Northern Hail Project has only been around for about a couple of years but is well funded by committed companies that see value in supporting the studies to learn more, he said.
“There is new knowledge that we are going to have in a few years, because we are doing studies at a scale that we haven’t done before,” he said. “That makes me very excited that we’re about to learn a lot over the next five, 10 years.”
Alysa Pederson, an Alberta-based warning preparedness meteorologist for Environment and Climate Change, said storms are the result of natural forces that science can shed light on.
“Nobody’s controlling the weather but the planet and the sun,” Pederson recently told the Albertan.
“It’s all fluid dynamics. The atmosphere essentially functions like the ocean does; it’s a fluid. The atmosphere is trying to redistribute heat from the equator to the poles on the large scale, because the sun is providing energy to our system,” she said.
“That’s essentially what causes the weather … all of these little intricacies that lead to thunderstorms and different types of weather and all of that, none of that can ever be geo-engineered,” she added.
“It’s very purely a science. And that’s kind of what actually makes it so interesting to me and many other meteorologists, is it’s not something that anybody can control; weather does its thing, and we just have to kind of be in awe of that.”
Accelerating climate change fuelling storms
However, recognizing the earth’s climate has changed throughout the planet’s history even prior to human presence, non-stop industrial activity that started in the 18th century has substantially accelerated an otherwise naturally-occurring cycle that would unfold over many millennia to a span of mere “centuries or sooner … some of the things we’re seeing now are surprising climatologist and the scientists in how rapidly things are happening,” she said.
Pederson cited as an example Hurricane Milton that impacted Florida early in October after intensifying from a tropical storm to a Category 5 hurricane in an astoundingly short period of time.
“That storm even broke what the computer models were suggesting it’d be capable of,” she said. “How fast it went from a tropical cyclone to a category five hurricane was absolutely unprecedented.”
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