By SETH BORENSTEIN, CAROLYN KASTER and BRITTANY PETERSON, Associated Press

SHAMROCK, Texas (AP) — As severe storms once again soak, twist and pelt the nation’s midsection, a team of dozens of scientists is driving into them to study one of the nation’s costliest but least-appreciated weather dangers: Hail.

Hail rarely kills, but it hammers roofs, cars and crops to the tune of $10 billion a year in damage in the U.S. So in one of the few federally funded science studies remaining after Trump administration cuts, teams from several universities are observing storms from the inside and seeing how the hail forms. Project ICECHIP has already collected and dissected hail the size of small cantaloupes, along with ice balls of all sizes and shapes.

An approaching storm with a shelf cloud and rain shaft is visible during a Project ICECHIP operation on Tuesday, June 3, 2025, in Scotland, Texas. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

Scientists in two hail-dimpled vehicles with special mesh protecting the windshields are driving straight into the heart of the storms, an area known as the “shaft” where the hail pelting is the most intense. It’s a first-of-its-kind icy twist on tornado chasing.

“It’s an interesting experience. It sounds like somebody on the outside of your vehicle is hitting you with a hammer,” said Northern Illinois University meteorology professor Victor Gensini, one of the lead researchers.

A team of journalists from The Associated Press joined them this week in a several-day trek across the Great Plains, starting Tuesday morning in northern Texas with a weather briefing before joining a caravan of scientists and students looking for ice.

Victor Gensini, Northern Illinois University meteorology professor and a lead scientist of Project ICECHIP, right, and Logan Bundy, PhD Candidate at NIU and ICECHIP IOP assistant, look at cloud formations during a Project ICECHIP operation, Tuesday, June 3, 2025, south of Tipton, Okla. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

Driving toward the most extreme forecasts

The caravan features more than a dozen radar trucks and weather balloon launching vehicles. At each site, the scientists load and unload drones, lasers and cameras and other specialized equipment. There are foam pads to measure hail impact and experimental roofing material. There are even special person-sized funnels to collect pristine hail before it hits the ground and becomes tainted with dirt.

Victor Gensini, Northern Illinois University meteorology professor and a lead scientist of Project ICECHIP, checks storm data in the command vehicle during an operation Tuesday, June 3, 2025, south of Tipton, Okla.(AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

Already in treks across Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas, the team has found hail measuring more than 5 inches (13 centimeters) in diameter — bigger than a softball, but not quite a soccer ball. The team’s equipment and vehicles already sport dings, dimples and dents that scientists show off like battle scars.

“We got a few good whacks,” said forensic engineer Tim Marshall, who was carrying roofing samples to see if there were ways shingles could better handle hail. “I look at broken, busted stuff all the time.”

Victor Gensini, Northern Illinois University meteorology professor and a lead scientist of Project ICECHIP, speaks with Seth Borenstein, Associated Press science writer, as they stage in a Walmart parking lot before a Project ICECHIP operation Tuesday, June 3, 2025, in Atlus, Okla. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

At Tuesday’s weather briefing, retired National Weather Service forecaster David Imy pointed to potential hot spots this week in Texas, Oklahoma and New Mexico. Computer models show the potential for a “monster storm down here near the Red River” later in the week, he said. Acting on the latest forecasts, Gensini and other leaders told the team to head to Altus, Oklahoma, but be ready to cross the Red River back into Texas at a moment’s notice.

A few hours after his briefing, Imy had the opportunity to chase one of the bigger storms, packing what radar showed was large hail at 8,000 feet in the air. Because of the warm air closer to the surface, the hail was only pea sized by the time it hit the ground. But the outing still provided good data and beautiful views for Imy, who was with a group that stationed themselves about a half-mile from the center of the storm.

“Beautiful colors: turquoise, bluish green, teal,” Imy said, pointing to the mushroom shaped cloud dominating the sky. “This is beauty to me and also seeing the power of nature.”

Hannah Vagasky holds a foam board hail pad covered with impact dents in a parking lot Tuesday, June 3, 2025, in Shamrock, Texas, as the team prepares for a day of hailstorm chasing. The hail pad is used to measure the size, angle of impact and intensity of hail. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

A costly but overlooked severe weather problem

This is not just a bunch of scientists looking for an adrenaline rush or another sequel to the movie “Twister.” It’s serious science research into weather that damages a lot of crops in the Midwest, Gensini said. Hail damage is so costly that the insurance industry is helping to pay for the mission, which is primarily funded by the National Science Foundation.

“These are the stones that do the most damage to lives and property,” Gensini said. “We want the biggest hail possible.”

Members of the University of Colorado Boulder’s Integrated Remote and In-Situ Sensing flight team stage in a Walmart parking lot before a Project ICECHIP operation Tuesday, June 3, 2025, in Atlus, Okla. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

A 2024 study by Gensini found that as the world warms from human-caused climate change, small hailstones will become less likely while the larger ones become more common. The bigger, more damaging ones that the ICECHIP team is studying are projected to increase 15% to 75% this century depending on how much the world warms. That’s because the stronger updrafts in storms would keep stones aloft longer to get bigger, but the heat would melt the tinier ones.

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The experiment is unique because of the combination of driving into the hail and deploying numerous radars and weather balloons to get an overall picture of how the storms work, Gensini said, adding that hail is often overlooked because researchers have considered it a lower priority than other extreme weather events.

Outside scientists said the research mission looks promising because there are a lot of unanswered questions about hail. Hail is the No. 1 reason for soaring costs in billion-dollar weather disasters in the United States, said meteorologist Jeff Masters, who cofounded Weather Underground and is now at Yale Climate Connections.

“Now a large part of that reason is because we simply have more people with more stuff in harm’s way,” said Masters, who wasn’t part of the research. “Insurance has become unaffordable in a lot of places and hail has become a big reason.”

In Colorado, hail is “actually our most costly natural disaster,” said Lori Peek, director of the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado, adding that “hail does such incredible damage to property.”

Victor Gensini, Northern Illinois University meteorology professor and a lead scientist of Project ICECHIP, right, and Logan Bundy, PhD Candidate at NIU and ICECHIP IOP assistant, left, stand at the command vehicle watching an approaching storm Tuesday, June 3, 2025, in Scotland, Texas. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

Chauntyll Allen (Courtesy of St. Paul Public Schools)

Four candidates have filed to run in the special election this August for the Ward 4 seat on the St. Paul City Council.

Ward 4 covers part or all of five neighborhoods — Hamline-Midway, Merriam Park, St. Anthony Park and parts of Macalester-Groveland and Como.

The candidates include Chauntyll Allen, a leader of Black Lives Matter Twin Cities who serves on the St. Paul Board of Education; Molly Coleman, the founder of the nonprofit People’s Parity Project, which seeks progressive court reform; Cole Hanson, a statewide online education coordinator who teaches nutrition to recipients of federal food assistance, or SNAP; and Carolyn Will, founder of CW Marketing and Communications.

Molly Coleman. (Courtesy of the candidate)
Cole Hanson.

The non-partisan election will take place Aug. 12 by ranked choice, meaning voters will be allowed to rank their candidates in order of preference. There will not be a political primary.

The winner will fill the seat vacated in March by former Council Member Mitra Jalali and serve through the November 2028 election.

Carolyn Will.

Matt Privratsky was recently appointed by the mayor to fill the Ward 4 seat on an interim basis, through the August election. Tuesday was the last day to file for the Aug. 12 election. Candidates may withdraw their names from the ballot through Thursday.

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Kylie Linh Hoang had been looking at a lot of faces.

As the assistant curator at the Minnesota Museum of American Art, she co-created the downtown museum’s new flagship exhibition of its permanent collection. The show, “Here, Now,” opens on a pair of gallery walls with some two dozen portraits looking down upon visitors, welcoming them in.

Behind the scenes, as Hoang was considering the hundreds of portraits in the M’s collection, many of which ultimately fell outside the scope of the “Here, Now” show, she found herself reflecting on the invisible relationship between the subject of a portrait and the artist. A portrait doesn’t only depict what a person looks like — instead, more precisely, it depicts how one person perceives another.

“Even if you do feel you’re looking your best, it’s kind of scary to let somebody that close to you,” she said. “There’s a sort of reciprocity in that process. The portrait tells you just as much about the painter or the artist as it tells you about the subject.”

Minnesota Museum of American Art assistant curator Kylie Linh Hoang sits on a bench in an exhibition she created, called “When You’re In The Mirror…,” on May 21, 2025. Artworks in this particular gallery are hung a few inches lower than is common, which Hoang said is meant to challenge traditional ideas of who is prioritized in art museums. (Courtesy of the Minnesota Museum of American Art)

This is the idea behind the adjacent exhibition “When You’re In The Mirror…,” Hoang’s first solo-curated show, on view through Aug. 3 following a four-month extension. If we solely pay attention to the subjects of portraits, the exhibition argues, perhaps we’re missing part of the story.

To illustrate her point, Hoang points out one of the exhibit’s vignettes, in which four works are shown together: One finished painting and one unfinished sketch each by Clara Mairs and Clement Haupers, romantically linked St. Paul artists and educators in the early 20th century, with both artists’ pairs of works depicting the other.

In Mairs’ sketch of Haupers, the man’s body is drawn only in quick, gestural outlines but, in his face, she’s careful to render the mustache and arched eyebrows that also show up in her realistic painting of him. More than just confirming that Haupers had a mustache and eyebrows, this could lead us to infer that these were particularly important characteristics of his from the perspective of the person who probably knew him most intimately, which Hoang said illuminates the more tender moments of their relationship.

“Traditionally when you talk about portrait shows, there’s an expectation of very serious faces in gold frames; this person was a general in a war, and this person was a very well-to-do lady philanthropist,” Hoang said. “I didn’t want to recreate that.”

By redirecting focus back onto the artists and their relationships with their subjects, Hoang aims to call attention to and push back against common tropes of depicting men as powerful and stately and strong, and women as anonymous “symbols for other things; virginity, purity, sacrifice, motherhood,” she said.

Minnesota Museum of American Art assistant curator Kylie Linh Hoang discusses Leslie Barlow’s 2020 painting “Alex, at Juxtaposition Arts,” at the museum on May 21, 2025. The exhibition “When You’re In The Mirror…,” Hoang’s first solo curated show, puts portraits in the context of the relationships between their subjects and the artists behind the canvas. (Courtesy of the Minnesota Museum of American Art)

In a portrait of a person in a cowboy hat riding a horse through the desert — made with glitter, and in a crocheted frame — what is artist Moises Salazar saying about gender and masculinity? In the 1922 painting “Dewey Albinson,” Frances Cranmer Greenman depicts her artist friend and student in his studio. Shown directly alongside it is Leslie Barlow’s 2020 painting “Alex, at Juxtaposition Arts,” in which the title man, a graffiti artist, stands in front of his work. What is Barlow, and also Hoang, saying here about what an ‘artist’ looks like, what art is legitimized and how that might change over time?

The exhibition’s title, “When You’re In The Mirror…,” is a cheeky nod to the opening track of pop singer Charli XCX’s album “Brat” — itself a form of self-portrait, Hoang pointed out. And at the end of the exhibition, you’ll find an actual mirror, overlaid with the second half of the show’s titular lyric: “Do you like what you see?”

“I am not a subtle person; I think we’ve established that,” Hoang said, laughing. “I wanted folks to think about how they would feel seeing their faces in this space, too.”

In fact, though, one of the most conceptually interesting aspects of the show is also among its most subtle. Traditionally, museum artworks are hung with their centers about 60 inches from the floor — roughly corresponding to eye-level of the average man, Hoang said — but she positioned the works in “When You’re In The Mirror…,” at an average of about 54 inches from the ground.

“I was thinking about who gets the best view,” she said. “I’m 5’5 — even though I have big shoes on today — and, why don’t I get a good view of things? So the show is actually low, because I was thinking about who’s being prioritized during this viewing experience.”

“When You’re In The Mirror…” is on view at the M’s Nancy and John Lindahl Gallery through Aug. 3. Admission to the museum (350 N. Robert St.), located in the Pioneer Endicott Building and accessible either from the street or skyway, is free during its opening hours, Thursdays to Sundays from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.

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