engleski

The SWALDRIC project

Severe convective storms are a primary cause of catastrophic loss through property damage and life-threatening weather conditions. These events are characterized by the presence of heavy convective storms, lightning that can initiate wildfires, strong and damaging winds (e.g., wind gusts), as well as heavy rain that can cause flash floods and hail. Due to sparse observations and inability of conventional climate models to represent these local weather phenomena, our understanding of severe weather events and their response to a changing climate is still very limited. Advances in computational power and recent developments in atmospheric modeling have enabled the use of climate models at kilometer scale horizontal resolutions. These so-called convection-resolving models (CRMs) resolve deep convective events such as thunderstorms and rain showers. Such models have been used for numerical weather forecasting purposes for over a decade. Although these models improve the simulation of heavy precipitation, their application for climate studies and the analysis of severe convective events, like lightning, hail and severe winds, has been very limited. The SWALDRIC project investigate severe weather events over Europe, with a specific focus on the Alpine and Adriatic region. The main goals of the study are to better understand severe weather events, to evaluate their representation in weather and climate models, and to investigate their response to climate change. Key elements of the proposal are: The exploitation of a unique Croatian hail-pad data set, the exploration and intercomparison of a wide range of different atmospheric (weather and climate) modeling systems, and the use of kilometer-scale pan-European decade-long simulations using the first regional climate modeling framework able to run entirely on Graphics Processing Units (COSMO-GPU).

severe weather, hail, CRM

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