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Thunderstorm-related severe weather, in particular hail, causes extensive damage to life and infrastructure in the Alpine region. However, changes in hail impact due to a warmer climate are still not fully understood. In the scClim project, convection-permitting regional climate simulations over Europe using the model COSMO with a ~2.2 km horizontal resolution have been conducted for present-day climate conditions (2011-2021) and a climate scenario with a 3C global warming using a pseudo-global-warming approach. ERA5 reanalyses were used as boundary conditions and a CMIP6 simulation (MPI-ESM1-2-HR) to infer the large-scale climate-change signal. The integrated online diagnostic HAILCAST is used to calculate maximum hail size. The simulations provide total precipitation and maximum hail size estimates every 5 minutes, which allows for hail cell tracking in the climate simulations and the analysis of hail events in a warmer climate. Validation of the present-day simulation against observations of temperature, precipitation and hail shows an overall good model performance. For hail in particular, radar-based, station-based and crowd-sourced observations have been used to assess the model performance in simulating hail on spatial, diurnal and seasonal scales. The validation outcome encourages further study of the climate signal of hail as simulated with the pseudo-global-warming approach. We will show projected changes in the spatial distribution and seasonal cycle of hail over Europe as well as changes in lifetime, storm area and location of hail cells due to a 3C global warming.
Thurnherr et al. (Fri,) studied this question.