There's been a lot of discussion about tornado ratings recently, so here goes: our paper on the impacts of the 24 June 2021 violent tornado paper has recently been accepted and published in the early online release form: doi.org/10.1175/WCAS-D… ...

At ESSL we are working with ECMWF on providing ensemble predictions for large hail. It is still experimental, but this was a the forecast for this Tuesday 0600. I will tag some pictures of hail in the various regions in the thread.

Wissenschaftler des ESSL und diverser Wetterdienste haben eine neue, allgemeingültige Intensitätsskala für #Tornados und schwere konvektive Windereignisse entwickelt. Im heutigen Thema des Tages stellen wir die neue 'Internationale Fujita Skala' vor: dwd.de/DE/wetter/them…

The ESSL and ESWD websites are temporarily unreachable because of a technical issue at our web service provider. They are working on restoring the service as soon as possible. We apologize for the inconvenience.

La escala #IF #InternacionalFujita ha sido desarrollada por un equipo internacional liderado por Pieter Groenemeijer 🇪🇺💙💛 ESSL

Panel discussion to close out the field campaign session at #EHW2024 Julian Brimelow Jeff Trapp Pieter Groenemeijer 🇪🇺💙💛 Dr. Becky Adams-Selin

And the last item on our ESWD review agenda: fatalities. Outside of the 20 000+ fatality event in Libya , there were 292 weather events resulting in 524 fatalities. Most fatalities were caused by heavy rainfall, followed by severe wind gusts and avalanches.

In 2023, 592 severe weather events caused 2057 injuries. Severe wind gusts were responsible for most injuries, followed by large hail and tornadoes. Note: The Darnah, Libya flash flood is not included here, as it would dominate the statistics with 7000 injuries per one event.

Want to know more about storms? We still have some spots left at both the courses and Testbeds! A new addition this year is the Radar meteorology and storm microphysics course by PSURadarMeteorology . For more details and to register, go to our events page: events.essl.org

We collected 1410 damaging lightning reports in 2023. Lightning caused 57 fatalities and 143 injuries. Some countries have better coverage of damaging lightning reports than the others. Have we missed any event in your country? Please submit it here: eswd.eu

We end this week with heavy rainfall and more than 8000 reports submitted to ESWD last year. 2023 featured by far the deadliest weather event stored in the ESWD: the 11 September floods in Libya, especially in the city of Darnah (Derna), which caused more than 20 000 fatalities.

We almost reached 10 000 large hail reports in 2023! Hail injured at least 328 people and you can find the list of the biggest cases here: essl.org/cms/hailstorms… The number of reports is now even higher than stated in the blog as the work on the reports is never truly finished.

We continue with severe wind reports. We've collected more than 40 500 of them in 2023. Severe wind gusts caused 115 fatalities and 1092 injuries. Steep increase compared to the other years is caused primarily by the ESSL staff becoming more efficient with the data collection.

Here we come with the annual statistics about different severe weather hazards. First of all, tornadoes. There were 872 of them in 2023 with 599 being waterspouts. 17 tornadoes were strong, classified either IF2 or IF3 and there were no violent (IF4 or IF5) tornadoes.

Our study on the evolution of large hail in Europe and North America has now been published. The conditions have become much more favorable for large hail in some parts of Europe. More in this thread: