A new physically based stochastic event catalog for hail in Europe

Hailstorms represent one of the major sources of damage and insurance loss to residential, commercial, and agricultural assets in several parts of Central Europe. However, there is little knowledge of hail risk across Europe beyond local historical damage reports due to the relative rarity of severe...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Natural hazards (Dordrecht) 2014-09, Vol.73 (3), p.1625-1645
Main Authors: Punge, H. J., Bedka, K. M., Kunz, M., Werner, A.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Analysis
Civil Engineering
Climate
Earth and Environmental Science
Earth Sciences
Earth, ocean, space
Engineering and environment geology. Geothermics
Environmental Management
Exact sciences and technology
Geophysics/Geodesy
Geotechnical Engineering & Applied Earth Sciences
Hail
Hydrogeology
Insurance
Losses
Mountain regions
Natural Hazards
Natural hazards: prediction, damages, etc
Original Paper
Risk
Severe weather
Stochastic models
Studies
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Summary:Hailstorms represent one of the major sources of damage and insurance loss to residential, commercial, and agricultural assets in several parts of Central Europe. However, there is little knowledge of hail risk across Europe beyond local historical damage reports due to the relative rarity of severe hail events and the lack of uniform detection methods. Here we present a new stochastic catalog of hailstorms for Europe. It is based on satellite observations of overshooting cloud tops (OT) that indicate very strong convective updrafts and hail reports from the European Severe Weather Database (ESWD). Historic hail events are defined based on OT detections from satellite infrared brightness temperatures between 2004 and 2011 for the warm seasons (April–September). The satellite-based historical event properties are complemented by hailstone observations from ESWD to stochastically simulate more than 1 million individual events with an event footprint resolution of 10 km. The final hail event catalog presented in this paper is the first one with a spatial event distribution that is based on a single homogeneous observation source over Europe. Areas of high hail probability or hail risk are found over Central and Southern Europe, including mountainous regions such as the Alps or the Pyrenees. Another region of relatively high hail risk is present over central Eastern Europe.
ISSN:0921-030X
1573-0840
DOI:10.1007/s11069-014-1161-0