Articles | Volume 13, issue 2
https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-13-747-2020
https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-13-747-2020
Research article
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17 Feb 2020
Research article | Highlight paper |  | 17 Feb 2020

Quantifying hail size distributions from the sky – application of drone aerial photogrammetry

Joshua S. Soderholm, Matthew R. Kumjian, Nicholas McCarthy, Paula Maldonado, and Minzheng Wang

Data sets

HailPixel Survey Data and Analysis from 26 November 2018, San Rafael, Argentina J. S. Soderholm https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3383227

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Short summary
Collecting measurements of hail size and shape is difficult due to the infrequent and dangerous nature of hailstorms. To improve upon this, a new technique called HailPixel is introduced for measuring hail using aerial imagery collected by a drone. A combination of machine learning and computer vision methods is used to extract the shape of thousands of hailstones from the aerial imagery. The improved statistics from the much larger HailPixel dataset show significant benefits.