Create a Hail Mitigation Plan
To manage extreme weather such as damaging hail, you need to plan and prepare. You need a hail mitigation plan that is documented and shared with stakeholders. The plan should be a living document that is periodically revisited and fine-tuned. It needs to consist of three parts:
- Tools and content for early awareness of the threat
- Assign responsibility for monitoring active threats
- Real-time information that will trigger a manual or automated stow of panels
As with any successful plan, you need to assemble your team before hail season and walk through your plan, discuss responsibilities and perform a dry run. Your Indji Watch Account Manager would be happy to support you in these pre-hail season activities.
Eliminate Surprises
Early awareness of these events is just as vital as the imminent alert you'll receive before the storm arrives. Why? Because early awareness = preparedness and readiness. The Storm Prediction Center issues hail outlooks each morning, and those are updated four times per day by highly skilled severe weather meteorologists. Ideally you are merging data from those outlooks with your asset locations in a system that can notify you of the threat and tell you if it is significant. You will then need ongoing information leading up to the event to help you assess if the threat is growing. This information needs to be available to all stakeholders.
Take Action
You need accurate meteorological information to make sure your panels are stowed in time for impact. Here are some examples of what you can benefit from:
- Alerts for damaging hail
- Visuals of the storm and imminent impact
- Threat data delivered in an API for integration into internal systems that trigger an automated stow
The information should be based on your stow criteria and impact likelihood to your asset. A post analysis of the event should occur where you access the accuracy of the information received and any impact to your asset. Tools like Indji Watch give you the ability to adjust the parameters that trigger the damaging hail alerts so you can fine tune your process.
