Severe Convective Storms in Europe: Ten Years of Research and Education at the European Severe Storms Laboratory

Abstract

The European Severe Storms Laboratory (ESSL) was founded in 2006 to advance the science and forecasting of severe convective storms in Europe. ESSL was a grassroots effort of individual scientists from various European countries. The purpose of this article is to describe the 10-yr history of ESSL and present a sampling of its successful activities. Specifically, ESSL developed and manages the only multinational database of severe weather reports in Europe: the European Severe Weather Database (ESWD). Despite efforts to eliminate biases, the ESWD still suffers from spatial inhomogeneities in data collection, which motivates ESSL’s research into modeling climatologies by combining ESWD data with reanalysis data. ESSL also established its ESSL Testbed to evaluate developmental forecast products and to provide training to forecasters. The testbed is organized in close collaboration with several of Europe’s national weather services. In addition, ESSL serves a central role among the European scientific and forecast communities for convective storms, specifically through its training activities and the series of European Conferences on Severe Storms. Finally, ESSL conducts wind and tornado damage assessments, highlighted by its recent survey of a violent tornado in northern Italy.

Challenges and Recent Advances in Hail Research

“…Furthermore, the comparability of observing systems even within the same category (e.g., differently calibrated radar networks) represents an unresolved problem. Ground-truth observations through crowdsourcing mobile applications [European Weather Observer App (EWOB), Groenemeijer et al (2017); MeteoSwiss App, social media] or drone observations to detect the spatial pattern of areas affected by hail are valuable and low cost. Such methods, however, also need to be complemented by standardized direct ground observations such as those from automatic hail sensors.…”

Investigation of the temporal variability of thunderstorms in central and western Europe and the relation to large‐scale flow and teleconnection patterns

“…Complicating understanding this problem further is that observational records that describe the underlying frequency of thunderstorms are incomplete, making such an analysis challenging (e.g. Groenemeijer et al, 2017;Martius et al, 2018). This issue is further exacerbated by the lack of a multinational observational dataset to provide a climate quality record for this type of analysis (Tippett et al, 2015).…”

“…A number of approaches have attempted to remedy this issue including using model-derived convective precipitation (e.g. Allen et al, 2015a;Groenemeijer et al, 2017;Madonna et al, 2018), matching of favourable environmental conditions with satellite overshooting top incidence (e.g. Punge et al, 2017) or focusing on forcing mechanisms that lead to the initiation of thunderstorms such as objective weather types or regimes (Bissolli and Dittmann, 2001;Bissolli et al, 2007;Kapsch et al, 2012;Mohr et al, 2015b).…”

A Ten Years Hail Climatology Based on ESWD Hail Reports in Romania, 2007-2016

“…The density of large hail reports for the Romanian territory is low (50 -70 reports per 10000 km²) compared to Germany, Austria or northern Italy where there are over 200 reports per 10000 km² (Groenemeijer et al, 2017). The highest density of reports came from north-east, south-east and north-western Romania.…”