Abstract
Severe convective phenomena cause significant loss in the economy and, primarily, casualties. Therefore, it is essential to forecast such extreme events to avoid or minimize the negative consequences. Wind shear provides an updraft-downdraft separation in the convective cell, which extends the cell lifetime. Wind shears between a few different air layers have been examined in all damaging convective cases in Poland, taken from the European Severe Weather Database between 2011 and 2015, in order to find their values and patterns according to the intensity of this phenomenon. Each severe weather report was assigned wind shear values from the nearest sounding station, and subsequently the presented summary was made. It was found that wind shear values differ between the given phenomena and their intensity. This regularity is particularly visible in shears containing 0 km wind. The highest shears occur within wind reports. Lower values are associated with hail reports. An important difference between weak and F1+ tornadoes was found in most of the wind shears. Severe phenomena probability within 0–6 km and 0–1 km shears show different patterns according to the phenomena and their intensity. This finding has its application in severe weather forecasting.
Highlights
One of the main causes of infrastructural and forest damage in Poland is related to severe weather events, including large hail, high wind speed gusts, and tornadoes
The LLS values remain the same in all the wind classes, but the wind reports generally have admittedly the highest values within all the phenomena. This regularity has not been observed in the 0–8 km and the 1–8 km bulk wind shears, these shears should not be analyzed while forecasting severe weather
The most commonly used deep layer sheer (DLS) enables us to properly distinguish the phenomena and these shears could be of great importance while forecasting severe weather
Summary
One of the main causes of infrastructural and forest damage in Poland is related to severe weather events, including large hail, high wind speed gusts, and tornadoes. Severe weather is more likely to occur when the convective available potential energy increases along with vertical wind shear [2], which is known as “local variation in the wind vector or any of its components in a given direction” [3]. High shear environments are more favorable than high buoyancy for the formation of strong supercell storms (which can produce a variety of severe weather) [9,10,11,12]. Significant shear is common during multicell storms and squall lines, including bow echoes, which may result in strong, damaging wind gusts near the surface, and occasionally tornadoes
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