interpretation of the intent and setting of the study. When this is considered, conditional scaling factors can help to better understand which influences control the intensification of rainfall with temperature on a regional scale.

Extreme convective precipitation on subhourly scales is notoriously misrepresented in rain gauge‐based observations, but uncertainties are weakly quantified at the 1 to 30 km scale. We employ a unique observing network, the high‐density WegenerNet and surrounding operational rain gauge network in southeastern Austria, to sample convective precipitation extremes at these scales. By systematically constructing lower‐density networks, we explore how estimated maximum area precipitation depends on observing station density. Using subhourly to hourly temporal resolution, we find a d−0.5(±0.1) power law decay of the event maximum area precipitation over distances d from 1 to 30 km, showing that operational gauge networks underrate extreme convective precipitation falling over small areas. Furthermore, extremes at point scale are found underestimated by operational networks by about 20%. We consider the dependencies representative for short‐duration convective events over similar regions at midlatitudes and the results valuable for high‐resolution climate model evaluation.

Objectives: To assess the impact of overweight on prognosis of renal cell carcinoma patients. Patients And Methods: A total of 2030 patients who underwent surgery for renal cell carcinoma from 1990 to 2011 in three University Medical Centers were included in this retrospective analysis. For all patients, height and weight measurements at the time of diagnosis were available for review. The median (mean) follow up was 56.6 months (66.0 months). Results: A low body mass index was significantly associated with poor tumor differentiation, histology, microscopic vascular invasion and metastatic disease at the time of diagnosis. A lower-than-average body surface area -stratified according to the European average for men (1.98 m 2 ) and women (1.74 m 2 ) -was significantly related to older age, poor tumor differentiation, the histological subtype and microscopic vascular invasion. In addition, a low visceral fat area calculated in a subgroup of 133 evaluable patients was associated with a higher risk of advanced disease (pT3-4 and/or N/M+) at diagnosis. The tumor-specific 5-year survival rate was 71.3, 78.7 and 80.1%, for patients with a body mass index of, <25, 25-30 and Ն30. Multivariate analysis confirmed body mass index as an independent prognostic factor. Conclusion: Our findings suggest that overweight represents an independent prognostic factor in renal cell carcinoma patients. Further research should address the question of why obese people have a higher incidence of renal cell carcinoma, but at the same time a significantly better prognosis than other patients, particularly in the case of localized disease.

Nowcasting of hailstorms still poses a major challenge to weather services, because of the limited availability of reliable large datasets and the short spatio-temporal scales involved. Two novel Eulerian and Lagrangian hail climatologies for the Alps are applied to address important aspects of hailstorms in the Alps: the diurnal cycle, their spatio-temporal development and the lightning properties. The database contains more than 100,000 ordinary and 30,000 hail storms (2002-2017). Based on that large sample of storms, the diurnal cycle of storm initiation and evolution is studied in the context of orographic forcing and cold-front occurrence statistics. Results show that, during daytime, storms mainly initiate over the foothills (Prealps) and move towards areas with higher terrain elevations. During night-time, the storms preferably move from the foothills to the plains. Five out of 16 years of the radar-derived convective storms show a significant yearly positive hail anomaly, from which two years show relative hail-initiation maxima evenly distributed over the 24 hour without a characteristic diurnal cycle. Relative hail maxima during night-time cannot always be explained with a higher occurrence of cold fronts. Time series of storm vertically integrated liquid water content are used to separate ordinary and hail storm development. Differences are found between vertically integrated liquid and its density in cold air-mass storms. Finally, lightning data from a ground-based network are combined with the radar-derived hailstreaks and evaluated with respect to their prediction skill as a function of lead time (flash rate, density, peak current, lightning jumps). Results show that lightning data provide only modest skill-scores in nowcasting hailstorms. Only the sudden increase in lightning rate (referred to as lightning jump) may be used as additional data for hailstorm nowcasting. However, their application in automatic nowcasting systems