Proxy-based hail-prone-day climatology and trends for Australia 1979-2021

Climatology of and trends on hail-prone days over Australia from 1979-2021

Hail-prone day climatology is calculated using the proxy of Raupach et al., 2023a (DOI: 10.1175/MWR-D-22-0127.1) applied to ERA5 pressure-level reanalysis data (DOI: 10.24381/cds.bd0915c6) at gridded 0.25 degree resolution for 1979-2021 (daily) and March 1979-May 2022 (seasonally). A day was considered hail-prone if a hail-prone atmosphere was detected at 03, 06, or 09 UTC. Trends in hail-prone days are calculated as in Raupach et al., 2023b (DOI: 10.1038/s41612-023-00454-8).

The climatology shows the mean annual hail-prone days per grid point over 1979-2021, while seasonal climatologies are over March 1979-May 2022. The trends information shows changes in annual hail-prone days over the same period.

NB: The seasonal climatology values differ slightly from those in Supp. Figure 3 in Raupach et al 2023, owing to an improved calculation of the climatology. The differences for each season are less than hail-prone 0.5 days. For details of the change see https://github.com/traupach/era5_hail_climatology/blob/main/analysis/climatology_for_zenodo.ipynb.

These data are licensed with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC-BY-4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode). These results contain modified Copernicus Climate Change Service information 2022. Neither the European Commission nor ECMWF is responsible for any use that may be made of the Copernicus information or data it contains.

If using these data, please inform T. Raupach at t.raupach@unsw.edu.au, and please cite the following paper for which these data were calculated: 

Raupach, T.H., Soderholm, J.S., Warren, R.A. et al. Changes in hail hazard across Australia: 1979–2021. npj Clim Atmos Sci 6, 143 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41612-023-00454-8

Acknowledgements: This research was undertaken with the assistance of resources and services from the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI), which is supported by the Australian Government.