Tornado Risk Climatology in Europe

Jürgen Grieser,Phil Haines

doi:10.3390/atmos11070768

Abstract

Violent tornadoes are rare in Europe but they can have devastating effects. Damage associated with individual tornadoes can reach several billion euros and they have caused hundreds of fatalities. The tornado risk varies considerably over Europe, but so far only a few national maps of tornado risk and one Europe-wide map exist. We show several different ways to create quantitative maps of tornado occurrence rates as follows: Kernel smoothing of observations, climatologies of convective parameters from reanalysis, output of a logistic regression model to link convective parameters with observed tornadoes, orography-dependent climatologies and finally the population-bias corrected tornado occurrence rates from the Risk Management Solutions (RMS) Europe Severe Convective Storm Model. We discuss advantages and disadvantages of each approach and compare the results. While the climatologies created from the individual methods show a lot of qualitative similarities, we advocate to combine the methods to achieve the most reliable quantitative climatology.

Highlights

Tornadoes are rare, small but potentially dangerous [1]
Even though hundreds of tornadoes occur every year in Europe, the tornado risk can be seen as high-impact but low-frequency since only a small portion of tornadoes reach devastating intensities
(2014) [12] published a Europe-wide tornado climatology created by kernel smoothing of all recorded tornadoes from the European Severe Weather Database (ESWD) [13]

Summary

Introduction

Small but potentially dangerous [1]. Maybe the deadliest tornado in Europe in the modern era was the one that hit a paper factory in Monville, France, on 19 August 1845 with at least. Even though hundreds of tornadoes occur every year in Europe, the tornado risk can be seen as high-impact but low-frequency since only a small portion of tornadoes reach devastating intensities. Risks of this type are usually underestimated [1]. Groenemeijer and Kühne (2014) [12] published a Europe-wide tornado climatology created by kernel smoothing of all recorded tornadoes from the European Severe Weather Database (ESWD) [13] While this risk climatology is Europe wide, it too suffers from reporting biases and does not quantify tornado occurrence rates.

Kernel Smoothing

Meteorological Environments

Combination of Observations and Meteorological Environments

Orographic Influence

Findings

A Tornado Risk Climatology