Convective Atmospheres: Linking Radar-based Event Descriptors and Losses From Flash Floods
Flash floods are among the most destructive and ubiquitous natural hazards in Central Europe. Mostly caused by extreme convective rainfall, we still lack a systematic understanding of how their impacts (in terms of damage to buildings and infrastructure) are related to the spatiotemporal attributes of the triggering rainfall (duration, spatial extent, intensity, and location), and the local terrain conditions. To address that gap, CARLOFFF aims at extracting a comprehensivecatalogue of convective events and their spatiotemporal attributes from almost 20 years of DWD weather radar data, and at linking these attributes to an extensive database of reported impacts from various sources. Furthermore, we attempt to map the regional occurrence of such impact-relevant events to large-scale atmospheric conditions (as represented by climate reanalyses). On that basis, it might be possible to detect past and future changes in both frequency and intensity of impact-relevant atmospheric conditions.
Institution: University of Potsdam
Contact: Maik Heistermann