Public weather service

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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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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In this presentation Gernot Zenkl presents us the work of avalanche forecasters in the Alpine regions of Austria. He describes us how the stations are maintained, what kind of measurements are done and what models are used for this kind of forecast. In general there are 7 synoptic situations or patterns that affect the Alpine areas and which the forecasters should be aware about. At the end Gernot analyzes three avalanche cases, he describes the damage done, the forecasting and the issued warnings.

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Forecasting winter weather is a challenging job for a forecaster because of snow, ice, freezing rain, fog, etc. In this presentation Lars Kirchhuebel is presenting how are the winter weather situations, especially black ice phenomena, forecasted and warned in Deutscher Wetterdienst and during this walkthrough he will present the black ice case of 7th of January 2017.

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The talk of this presentation is focused on analyzing development of convective cells that may give huge amounts of precipitation. Marcus Beyer shows us the ingredient based forecasting method analyzing CAPE, moisture and lift, the three essential ingredients for developing of convection and then additionally the shear component that governs the strength of a convective cell. Later on Marcus analyzes two cases of convection that caused major damages in Germany using this method.

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The presentation is about the three-tiered warning system with probabilistic texts days in advance that is used in Germany. The texts consist of pre-warning information about one or two days in advance and severe weather warnings a few hours and up to 12 hours in advance. Warning thresholds for Germany and the ways of delivering these warnings to public are presented along with the software used for this process.

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Many severe meteorological events occurred in Europe during the last decade and caused casualties and damages to the historical heritage and natural environment. The European Civil Protection agencies, supported by meteorological and hydrological institutes, aim to assess risk scenarios, to monitor and supervise events and risk levels, providing early warning to National and local authorities. Near real time accurate estimations of hydrological variables such as precipitation and soil moisture are invaluable for the hydrological risk evaluation, enable them to issue early warnings and plan for disaster relief at the local level. Besides measurements of key hydrological variables by ground-based instruments, often affected by a limited spatial coverage, advanced satellite-based precipitation and soil moisture products developed within different international programs as H SAF, are available and accessible to users in near-real time. Severe meteorological events are selected in order to understand how the main satellite precipitation product characteristics, i.e. accuracy, spatial pattern and resolution, update frequency and latency, impact the efficiency of a hydro-meteorological early warning system at a local level in an operational framework.

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Lake Balaton is the largest lake in the Carpathian Basin. The shallow lake (with 3.5 m mean depth) responds to the weather rapidly: in hot summers the water temperature increases above 25 °C, and at colder winters thick ice (20-40 cm) appears on the lake surface. The formation of the ice depends very much on the weather. Glassy ice forms when after a cold front passage in the night the wind and waves calm down and the previously mixed up and supercooled water freezes rapidly. During longer cold and windy weather period, ice appears in forms of ice floes, frozen to each other. This presentation tries to give an overview of the metamorphosis and special dynamic of the Balaton ice.

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Snowy winters lead to heavy snow loads on buildings and constructions. Surprisingly often, the snow load assessment basis of international and national standards are regionally reached or exceeded. Damages or even collapses do occur, cause expenses and threaten human lives. However, extreme snow loads only rarely are considered as natural hazards. This talk puts heavily burdened roofs in the spotlight by presenting recent efforts in updating the Austrian snow load standard and showing an actual example of snow load monitoring and hazard management.

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At the beginning, the economic interrelationships of winter tourism in the Alpine region, Austria and finally Tyrol are highlighted. The dependence of value creation on a reliable snow situation in winter therefore forces snow management, the economic and above all ecological tasks of which will be presented. The participants will get to know the essential problems and the existing approaches to solving them.

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The presence of snow cover on the land surface is closely linked to the prevailing climate. Moreover, by modulating surface energy fluxes snow cover is interactively linked to the atmosphere and constitutes an important component of global and regional climate systems. Available observations show a retreat of snow cover on hemispheric scales as a response to global warming, and climate projections consistently indicate a further decrease. Focusing on Europe and especially on the European Alps, this contribution summarizes current research on the fate of surface snow cover and its implications.

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