New research may lead to more accurate forecasts for extreme weather events across Australia. Video by University of Queensland via AAP.
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00So, the work that we're doing here, first and foremost, it benefits forecasters, which
00:04provide warning information out to the general public to act safely during hailstorms and
00:09mitigate damage.
00:10We have these weather prediction models which are able to, we say, explicitly predict hailstones.
00:16And this means we have individual hailstones being modelled inside an understorm.
00:21Traditionally, this is done by assuming the hailstones are spheres, just round balls.
00:26But when we start using this shape information we're collecting, all the properties of the
00:30hail changes.
00:31It tumbles, it collects water differently, it melts differently.
00:35And we see those properties, incorporating them, changes the way the hail moves in the
00:39cloud and how big it grows.
00:41The end game is to have these natural hailstones in a model and able to run this model in real
00:47time as we get radar data in and more model data.
00:50This allows us to produce short-term predictions, so on the order of half an hour out to the
00:55future.
00:56And that's what really matters, because we have high accuracy then.
01:00And with this new data, we're able to more accurately predict the hail size and landing
01:04location.