In April of 2024, a storm system over York County collapsed. The worst of what came next hit Rock Hill's Southside neighborhood, where some of the city's least resilient structures were.
The worst destruction was contained to barely a square mile, but was devastating.
It was also instructive.
At the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety Research Center in Richburg, just down the road a piece from Rock Hill, researchers like Jake Sorber make a living beating up on materials that make up the outside protective layer of a home.
The aim is to find what kinds of materials best withstand the sorts of punishments a severe hailstorm dishes out.
"Climatologically, this event was pretty rare," Sorber said of the storm. "The rarity of this event means that these impact-rated products that are made to withstand these hailstone impacts, aren't common around here."
They're hard to source, too.
"You really have to work hard to get this product to put it on your roof," he said.
And if you do manage to get impact-rated shingles or siding for your house, it will cost you.
"It's ... probably double the price of your traditional conventional asphalt shingle," Sorber said.
Over the past year, Sorber and his fellow researchers at IBHS have used the local data from the storm to test how well different brands, ages, and styles of materials like roofing shingles stood up.
"What we saw is that at different hail severities, the age dependency of the roof changed," he said. "If you had a new roof, you were pretty good, If you had an 11- to 15-year-old roof, you were like four-and-a-half times more likely to have a hail claim.
That was just for smaller hail. that battered Rock Hill.
"When you go to these clementine-sized hailstones," Sorber said, roof age didn't really matter all that much."
But will impact-rated shingles become more common in South Carolina as weather changes in the coming years?
That actually hinges on whether the weather will gets worse or better in the decades ahead — which is a debate in itself. Researchers at Northern Illinois University, in an article published in the journal Nature last August, suggest that larger hailstones, at least, will become more commonplace, as atmospheric conditions get more unstable in coming years.
But researchers at the South Carolina State Climatology Office say that scientists don’t have much to go on with hail, so prediction isn’t practical.
"There isn't really any climatology available for hail because we don't have any good hail reports until around the turn of the century," said Frank Strait, the State Climatology Office’s severe weather liaison.
Strait said that while manmade climate change often gets the full rap for bad weather trends, atmosphere is too complicated to boil down to one factor.
"There's long-term cycles of climate that we have to consider, like, for example, La Nina and El Nino," he said. "There's also cycles in the Atlantic water temperatures."
All of this makes trying to guess what's ahead for the weather tricky — even in real time.
One of the characteristics of the April hailstorm in Rock Hill last year was how suddenly it hit. There was a severe thunderstorm warning from the National Weather Service, but even NWS didn’t see what was about to level Southside.
"It's really hard with the tools that they have to say that the the storm was as bad as it was," Strait said.
NWS has an advanced Doppler radar. system at GSP airport, which serves as the primary radar for the Upstate, as far as Rock Hill.
"But because of the distance away from the radar, it makes it a little more difficult to see the structure of the storm at that distance and see what's going on," he said.
"The radar beam more or less goes in a straight line, but the Earth's surface is curved, so, the farther away you are from the radar, the higher up the, the radars beam is above the ground."
Which means, measuring multiple climates within a storm system that change sometimes block to block, makes measuring potential damage dodgy.
One solution is more data, culled in the most local and varied ways.
Strait advocates that South Carolina residents to join CoCoRaHS , the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail & Snow Network. CoCoRaHS is a 50-state volunteer network of citizens reporting weather conditions to help better track how extremely localized weather fits into larger weather patterns.
"The more of those observers we have the better," he said. "It helps us to verify our forecasts and to have a good idea about what is actually happening with precipitation."
