See what EWOB users report within a few hours when winter weather strikes:

The latest EWOB reports can be found here.

ECMWF and ESSL enter into a new stage of partnership: on 22 November 2016 the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts officially became a full institutional member of the European Severe Storms Laboratory.

After increasing informal cooperation over the past years this step will facilitate a close collaboration in a number of fields in the future, like in the exploitation of the European Severe Weather Database ESWD.

The ESSL now has 13 full institutional members, most of them national weather services.

Within the RAIN project, ESSL researchers Tomáš Púčik and Pieter Groenemeijer have produced projections of severe weather changes according to the EuroCordex regional climate model ensemble.

The ESSL researchers found that the consensus of the model projections suggested a 10 – 30% increase of severe convective weather events across much of Europe and 30 – 60 % in south-central Europe in the business-as-usual rcp8.5 scenario by the end of the century. These increases would be about half as large in the rcp4.5 scenario that assumes moderate climate change mitigation efforts.

RAIN project partners of the Finnish Meteorological Institute, Freie Universität Berlin and the Technical University Delft have investigated other hazards, such as wind storms, floods, forest fire and winter weather.

For more information on the RAIN project, projections of other hazards, and a link to the full report:

Click here

ESSL has lauched a free app called EWOB (European Weather OBserver) with which one can report and monitor the weather situation around oneself by viewing the reports of others. With the app, you can send a picture along with your report and to share it on Facebook or Twitter. By developing EWOB involves the public in collecting important “big data” regarding severe weather that will help weather forecasters, researchers and risk modellers to improve preparedness against severe weather.

To get the app, search for EWOB on Google Play or in the App Store!

The latest reports you can also see on our web map here.

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