ID#005

A homogenous approach in tornado climatology of Hungary for the recent five-year period (1996-2001) based on official damage reports

Szilárd Sárközi
Air Traffic and Airport Administration - Hungary

Following the impressions about recently born case listings we have arose a new report collecting methodology with homogenous coverage allows establishing spatial and temporal occurence and damaging capabilities – instead of studying historical records noting only the most glaring ones and strongly affected by urbanisation and its informational boom especially of the last decades; and also modern media consider significance and still the local but severe interests aren’t published widely.

On the other hand these recent years have served remarkably more and severe cases worth processing: 2 to 5 strikes or more-day-periods with more outbreaks. In this new approach we’re working with official damage reports collected and archived by the civil defence offices, organised in a national structural body from the general directorate through country headquarters down to settlements representatives, and receiving reports at more levels from every related services like forestries, power suppliers, rescues, etc.

All the cases will be presented in a multi-layered geoinformatical map system considering:

1. simultaneous seasonal and spatial distribution respect to the F-scale damaging capability,

2. generating and occurence respect to orography, land surface type,

3. synoptical situation, position in meso/miso-scale patterns. Introducing a new conceptual model: mostly appearing isolated and at the relative "SW"-tip (to the embedding system’s normal position) of the unstable area, demonstrating it through some case studies with its complex synoptic reconstruction using analysed and remote sensed fields simultaneously, and searching its reason in the self similar downscaling of the cut-off mechanism producing singular energy-density there.