The list of ECSS awardees together with their contributions – for best poster, best oral presentation and best student contribution – is now available here.

The awards were presented during the closing ceremony of the ECSS on the 18th of September 2015:

Dr. Harold E. Brooks receives the 3rd Nikolai Dotzek Award.

At the occasion of the 8th European Conference on Severe Storms that was held in Wiener Neustadt, Austria, Dr. Harold E. Brooks (National Severe Storms Laboratory, Norman, Oklahoma, USA) has been awarded the 3rd Nikolai Dotzek Award.

The Nikolai Dotzek Award was established in 2011 in the memory of ESSL’s first director and founding father, Dr. Nikolai Dotzek, who passed away in May 2010.

Dr. Brooks has been given the award for his innumerable and diverse contributions to the science of severe storms, which among many other accomplishments, include

• his pioneering work in developing and applying proxy parameters to assess the climatology and risk of severe storms, both regionally and globally.

• his contributions in establishing the connection between vertical wind shear in the lower troposphere and the occurrence of tornadoes.

• his extensive work and significant progress on verification methods for forecasts of extreme events.

In addition, Dr. Brooks was commended for his support to the European and international communities of severe storm researchers that has resulted in many fruitful collaborations.

A list of all Nikolai Dotzek Awardees is available here.

The official ECSS 2015 photo is now available here:

Photo (c) Thomas Schreiner, ESSL

At the ECSS in Wiener Neustadt, Austria, the Heino Tooming Award 2015 was presented to 

Alexander Keul, Bernhard Brunner, Melanie Korff, Sanjay Sharma, Partha Roy, John Allen, Katie A. Bowden, Mat Said Aini, Abu Bakar Elistina, Mohd Zainal Abidin Ab Kadir, Chandima Gomes and Mateusz Taszarek

for their work entitled

“Severe weather and psychology – Analysis of international survey data”, presented by Dr. Alexander Keul. 

Photo: Thomas Schreiner, ESSL

The full list of Heino Tooming Awardees is available here.

The ECSS in Wiener Neustadt by its participants offered an outstanding scientific programme. Scientists from all over the world, as far as from New Zealand, Japan, Korea, Argentina, Brazil and the USA exchanged knowledge with their European colleagues.

The next European Conference on Severe Storms will be held from 18 to 22 September 2017 in Pula, Croatia, in cooperation with the local organizing partner DHMZ.

The corporate report by ESSL, ARPA Veneto, ZAMG and MeteoNetwork on the 8 July 2015 Mira tornado is ready and available for download (PDF files):

Report including Attachment 1 (Tornado Intensity Map)

Attachment 2: List of damage ratings

Attachment 3: ESSL working paper for damage ratings

The Scientific Programme Committee sends a message to all ECSS participants (PDF files):

Message Text and Attachment

SHUTTLE BUS

Minor changes were made to the shuttle bus schedule, and a bus stop location map was added. Please check on the ECSS webpage!

VIDEO SESSION

We are preparing an exciting video session. Our ESSL employee Thilo Kühne has to deal nearly on a daily basis with tornado reports and therefore probably has the best overview of tornado video footage from Europe. At this conference he will present a unique collection of video sequences of tornadoes in Europe of the past years. In addition: If you have photos or videos of severe weather worth seeing, please approach us already before the conference. We are pleased to include such material into a diverting participants-collage.

PROGRAMME

A programme overview was added to the ECSS webpage. There will be printouts of the programme in your conference bag, which you will receive on site, so you do not need to print it out by yourself. The full programme book was also updated on the webpage.

LATE REGISTRATION

If you did not register for the conference so far (or for social events), please do so! Please remember, that registration is a separate process to – and not done with – the abstract submission! Having your registration data already in the conference system will heavily speed up the on-site registration! We also want to inform you, that there will be an option for calm on-site registration already on Sunday afternoon and evening, from 15:00 to 20:00 local time.

We are very looking forward to meeting you in person in Wiener Neustadt!

A map of the tornado path is now available (click for enlarged view):

Some of the photos show interesting details. Tornado winds blew (towards the viewer) through the gates of this hall or work shop, causing a Bernoulli effect to an internal wall of this building (bent wall on the left side of the image with broken windows). So, even though the roof remained in place in this case, the internal structural damage was significant:

Photo (c) Alois M. Holzer