It's been awhile since my last blog post, and I guess that's what happens when you've got so many irons in the fire. I'm continuing to work toward my Professional Engineer (PE) licensure in Civil/Structural Engineering. For those of you interested in pursuing your PE license, PPI offers both self-paced on-demand, and instructor-led preparation courses for both the Fundamentals of Engineering (FE) and Professional Engineering (PE) exams. I have trusted PPI for my successful passage of the FE Civil Exam last year, and am going through the PE Civil/Structural Licensing Exam Preparation Course, also offered by PPI.
In addition to preparing for the PE Exam, the first half of the years was quite busy working on several forensic meteorology cases, among which included a couple of aviation incidents, a fatal vehicle crash, litigation over blowing dust, and hail damage claims.
An Active Monsoon Season So Far...
We are nearing the end of July, and we're about 6 weeks into the North American Monsoon season that runs from June 15th through September 30th. The actual midway point in the monsoon season is around August 7th, so there's still plenty of time of get more beneficial rainfall over the Land of Enchantment. So how are we doing so far this monsoon season?
Like in any other year, the performance of the monsoon season greatly depends on where you are. Some areas along the central mountain chain have seen record rainfall, including a once-in-a-lifetime storm that dropped nearly 8 inches of rain south of Willard, NM on July 19, 2024. Images of stranded trucks as parts of Highway 42 between Willard and Corona were completely washed out by the storm's floodwaters, spread around the world. Meanwhile, people who had just returned to Ruidoso after a pair of devastating wildfires ravaged the town in mid-June, were forced to flee once again as floodwaters swept through the area from late June and into July.
On June 29, 2024, flash flooding inundated parts of the Albuquerque metro as persistent storms dumped over 2 inches of rain over parts of the city in less than 2 hours. Generally speaking, 2024 has been a much wetter season than record-hot and record-dry 2023, and most places are running above to well above normal, precipitation-wise. The only exceptions would be the Four Corners and far southeastern New Mexico, which have seen notably less rainfall this season.
While the monsoon pattern will take a bit of a hiatus this week, there is still plenty of time to add to the already-impressive rainfall totals that we're seeing in parts of New Mexico.
A Note About Hail Claims
Hail-producing thunderstorms are a byproduct of the monsoon season, and insurance claims for hail damage are a common thing around this time of year. I've dealt with a number of cases involving hail claims, and many times I find that one side or the other in a hail claim case relies on automated hail reports that may have not been reviewed by an expert meteorologist.
In recent years, several companies have emerged that use artificial intelligence to generate automated hail damage reports. These reports generally rely on data from storm reports from the National Weather Service forecast offices (NWS), Storm Prediction Center (SPC), NEXRAD radar imagery, surface observations from official reporting locations, among other data sources. All of this data is ingested and processed to generate a heatmap with estimated hailstone sizes for a given day or event, and then reports for estimated hail size for a given location and be generated. While these companies may claim to have an expert meteorologist on their staff, that meteorologist typically performs periodic quality reviews on the automated hail reports and recommends adjustments to the algorithms used to estimate hail size in the reports. Since these companies typically use a web interface allowing the automated generation and instant delivery of hundreds to thousands of these hail reports each day, it would be impossible for each report to be personally reviewed by a meteorologist. In other words, these automated hail reports are generally not reviewed by an expert meteorologist before they are delivered to the recipient.
That's why it's critically important to have an expert meteorologist review your hail damage claim before deciding your next steps. Call us at (505) 302-5460 or e-mail us at support@pagcore.com to talk to an expert about your particular situation.
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