Radar-derived storm characteristics and convective diagnostics associated with hourly maximum measured wind gusts around Australia

The data in this record describes various characteristics associated with hourly measured surface wind gusts across various locations in Australia, with these characteristics and data sources described below.

This record provides all data used in the preparation of Brown et al. (2023a), except for lightning data that can be obtained from the World Wide Lightning Location Network archive

Record contents

• gust_observations.zip
  Within this zip archive, a .csv file is provided for wind gust observations, along with associated storm statistics from radar, and convective diagnostics from a global reanalysis. These data are provided for each of the 20 radar domains listed in Brown et al. (2023a). The .csv files follow the structure: gust_observations_x.csv, where x is the identification number for each radar from the Australian Unified Radar Archive.
   
• station_details.csv
  This file provides details on the automatic weather stations that measure the wind gusts, with station identifiers (column=Station_id) consistent between station_details.csv and gust_observations_x.csv.
   
• Table1.pdf 
  Descriptions of convective diagnostics from reanalysis, that are provided in gust_observations_x.csv. This table has been extracted from the supplementary information of Brown et al. (2023a), and references in this table can be found therein.
   
• radar_details.pdf 
  Taken from Table 1 from Brown et al. (2023a), showing the details of radars used here for storm statistics in gust_observations_x.csv.
   
• Fig1.jpeg
  Taken from from Brown et al. (2023a), showing a map of the radar domains used here for storm statistics in gust_observations_x.csv.

Wind gust data

Measured wind gusts here represent a 3-second average wind speed, at a height of 10 m above ground level. We also provide some derived quantities from the gust data (see table below). Gust data is provided by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, from 204 automatic weather stations (station_details.csv), chosen to be within 100 km of a weather radar with sufficient archived data. These data are originally provided by the Bureau of Meteorology at 1-minute frequency, representing a maximum over a 1-minute interval, but are resampled in this record to hourly frequency, for comparisons with other hourly data below (see Brown et al. (2023a) for details of this resampling). Note that any reuse of this data should properly acknowledge the Australian Bureau of Meteorology.

Radar data

Radar data is obtained by the Australian Unified Radar Archive (AURA), produced from operational weather radar within the Australian Bureau of Meteorology network. The level1b data used here is available from the AURA dataset on the Australian NCI under a CC4-BY-NC licence from https://dx.doi.org/10.25914/5f4c85732ee80. Various properties derived from radar reflectivity and Doppler velocity data is reported here in association with the wind gust observations. These properties are only reported if there is a storm object within 10 km and 10 minutes of the gust location (see Brown et al. (2023a) for storm object definition). Radar properties are described in the table below.

Environmental data

Various convective diagnostics are associated with wind gust observations, representing the convective environment and large-scale wind profile. These diagnostics are derived from a combination of pressure-level and surface-level ERA5 data (Hersbach et al. 2020), which is provided at hourly intervals on a 0.25-degree latitude-longitude grid, hosted on the Australian NCI (http:// dx.doi.org/10.25914/5fb115b82e2ba). Details on these convective diagnostics are provided in Brown et al. (2023a), and in Table1.pdf as provided in this record.

Column descriptions

The following table provides descriptions of columns of gust_observations_x.csv

References

Brown, A., Dowdy, A., Lane, T. P., & Hitchcock, S. (2023b). Types of Severe Convective Wind Events in Eastern Australia. Monthly Weather Review, 151(2), 419–448. https://doi.org/10.1175/MWR-D-22-0096.1

Brown, A., A. Dowdy, T. P. Lane, & Hitchcock, S. (2023a). Long-term observational characteristics of different severe convective wind types around Australia. Wea. Forecasting, https://doi.org/10.1175/WAF-D-23-0069.1, in press.

Hersbach, H., Bell, B., Berrisford, P., Hirahara, S., Horányi, A., Muñoz‐Sabater, J., et al. (2020). The ERA5 Global Reanalysis. Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, qj.3803. https://doi.org/10.1002/qj.3803