WMOD00079

• Contract/Permit #: #98-1
• Applicant: Western Kansas Groundwater
• Project Name: Kansas Weather Modification
• Date: 1/1/1998
• Weather Modification - Doc Type: Report

the season total. Since the WKWMP radar site is manned most of the season on a 24-hour basis, it is
hard to make the case that all these hail-days occurred as recorded and were missed by both radar
operators in Lakin and Colby. Part of the problem causing this discrepancy occurs when storms occur
at night and the damage is incorrectly reported as occurring on the next day's date when there are no
operations. If a farmer happens to be away from the farm when hail occurs, he may guess at the date,
in which case he may be wrong. This year, during the regular season, on days in which no seeding was
done, there were four days with only one hail claim and 2 days with 2 claims reported

On page 25, Figure 5 shows the 1998 distribution of hail damage throughout the State of
Kansas; Table 2, on page 26, lists monthly claims for each county in Kansas. On the whole, the
decrease in WKWMP hail claims parallels that of the State of Kansas in directional trend with the state
dropping about 8.5% from 12,580 in 1997 to 11,565 in 1998. However, WKWMP claims dropped
nearly 31 % from 3,612 claims in 1997 to 2,500 in 1998. More interestingly, when non-WKWMP
counties were separated and compared to WKWMP counties, there was a 1% increase in 1998 claims
over 1997 in non-WKWMPcourities, 8,968 claims in 1997 versus 9,065 in 1998 for non-WKWMP
areas within the state. Despite the inadequacies of using hail claims numbers, these trends are
undoubtedly a powerful indication that much better crop-hail insurance damage news awaits us in the
overall WKWMP target area when official data become available next spring.

For the second year in a row the county reporting the most claims in the entire State of Kansas
was Marshall County in NE Kansas with 715 claims, dropping down from 819 in 1997. The second
most claims' came from Barton County in Central Kansas with 609. The counties having the most
claims inside the WKWMP were Ford and Stanton with 463 and 426, respectively; within Kansas
those two counties were the 3rd and 5th. The most damaged counties, excepting Marshall and
Sumner, lay in a wide belt oriented NE-SW running from Mitchell, Smith and Osborne counties in
North Central Kansas, then to the southwest toward Stanton, Grant and Seward in SW Kansas.

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Table 3, on page 27, shows the claims history for the southern WKWMP target area since
1975, the year the program began. The 2,058 claims seen in the southern target area in 1998 were
5.7% below its 24-year average of 2,183 claims. 1998 had the lowest number of claims for the 6
year period 1993 - 1998 and second lowest for 1990 - 1998. Table 4 also provides a look at the
monthly breakdown ofhail claims in each of the WKWMP target area counties and on page 28 Tables
5 and 6 show monthly claims numbers for each target area. Table 7, on page 29, shows the daily
damages for each WKWMP county throughout the year. On page 30 Figs. 5 and 6 the graphs display
of the monthly hail distribution of both the WKWMP and the State of Kansas show July being a worse
hail month for the State of Kansas, on the whole, than in June; just the reverse of the WKWMP.

Table 8, on page 31, shows variously how the WKWMP counties fared during the worst 6
days in the 1998 season, that is, those producing the greatest numbers of hail claims in both the
Northern and Southern target areas and for the overall WKWMP area. In the lower left-hand part of
Table 8 is shown the 6 most-damaging days within the overall WKWMP target area. The percentage'
of claims of these six days to the total number of claims is 64.1 %, almost equaling its long-term
average of63.2% computed last year for all years back to 1985.

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