Weather

Making reliable severe weather forecasts is always a great challenge. Communicating them towards the public and special end users is sometimes greater, even if the forecast is good. Tamás Alaga says that the Hungarian Meteorological Service (OMSZ) plans to develop and simplify its two-level warning system to make it more understandable. The problem is knowing when to stop with these simplifications. Tamás also explains how does the service handle probabilistic forecasts and delivering such forecasts to public and consumers.

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Summer thunderstorm Kiira left a significant trace in Finland in August of 2017. With big forest damages because of strong wind gusts, big number of interventions in southern Finland this case is suitable for analysis and through that presenting the Finnish severe weather follow-up product LUOVA. Kaisa Solin from Finnish Met Service explains LUOVA more in detail in the video.

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The presentation is delivered on the basis of the polar air outbreak in mid April 2017 that caused a late winter outbreak in the Alpine area in Austria. Because of that Austrian met service had to reactivate winter maintenance warnings. Thomas Turecek of Austrian Met Service (ZAMG) explains us how did they cope with this event and how are the warnings they issued connected with climatological thresholds for that specific area.

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ANYWHERE project is a H2020 funded project that aims to develop tools to support coordination of the emergency response operations to face challenge of the extreme weather and climate events. Tuomo Bergman from Finnish Met Service (FMI) tells us that the purpose is to build a pan-European multi-hazard platform for faster analysis and anticipation of the risk prior to event occurrence, improved coordination of the emergency actions and assist to raise the self-preparedness.

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Jyri starts his talk about what ISTIKE actually is and why was there a need for such collaboration between several rescue services in Finland. The main aim of the project is to provide a rescue center with a joint emergency center in eastern Finland. Jyri also describes what are the procedures when a certain severe weather event approaches and what are the preparedness levels of the rescue services. What is the role of other institutes?

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The Norwegian Met Service (MetNo) uses a wide variety of social media from Facebook and Youtube to Twitter and Instagram for delivering information to people around the country (and world). That way MetNo can post numerous short news, pictures and general weather information that people find appealing because of their shortness and informativity. On the other hand how are the extreme events reported through such services?

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Nuno Moreira from Portuguese Met Service (IPMA) is going to show us the current warning system used in Portugal. How are their decisions affected by the impacts that weather may have on wide variety of parameters that can then affect people? Social media are playing an important role in communicating weather information to people nowadays. How to, what and when to communicate certain warnings to people? Nuno will try to answer all of these questions from IPMA's point of view.

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A case study including three examples of tropical air advection into mid-latitudes is presented by Barbara Wrona from Polish Met Service (IMGW). These protrusions of warm and moist air caused convection and severe convection over a big part of the country. Barbara is going to analyze the latter one from the synoptic point of view and will tell us about the warnings that have to be issued in these cases.

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Severe weather warnings at MeteoSwiss started more than thirty years ago, firstly with warnings for heavy precipitation. After the storm 'Lothar' in 2001 warnings for wind, rain and snow have been introduced and then the system was updated in 2009 with new software, NinJo. After this short introduction, Daniel Murer from MeteoSwiss will present us a case that will illustrate the process of issuing warnings and decision making in the Swiss Met Service.

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Cold lows that bring significant amounts of snow are quite rare in Israel and if they do appear they usually affect the mountainous area of the central part of the country. One such event happened in December 2013 and brought a lot of problems in traffic, power supply and also took lives. Shay Frenkel from Israeli Met Service described the synoptic situation of the event and told us what other tools to use and how did the climatology of the area affect the prediction.

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Izolda Marcinoniene from Lithuanian Met Service presented us the case study about a severe storm that happened on 11 July 2016 in Lithuania. Tropical air mass usually reaches Baltic states in the summer time and because of it convection develops in the region, but this case deserves a special treatment due to the intensity of the convection that happened. A mesoscale convective system (MCS) developed during the day over Poland and later shifted to Lithuania and Belarus.

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The Extreme Forecasting Index (EFI) and the Shift Of Tails (SOT) index are two operations products developed by ECMWF for usage in forecasting severe weather. The EFI is based on ECMWF ensemble forecasts and it compares these forecasts with the model climate (M-climate) that is generated by the model re-runs. While the high EFI tells us that the confidence level of a forecast is higher for a certain event, the positive high SOT value tells us that the event would be more extreme than the one with low SOT value. At the end Ivan shows us a few cases and demonstrate how EFI and SOT work together.

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