We would like to advertise the following seminars that can still be booked for reduced rates until the end of this month:

Our cornerstone seminar “Forecasting Severe Convection I” by Dr. Tomáš Púčik from 25 to 29 March 2019, which combines lectures with practical forecasting exercises. When this seminar was last held in October, it received a very high mean participant grade of 9.9 (on a scale from 0 to 10). Join and boost your ability in forecasting severe convection!

Our specialized seminar “Aviation Forecasting of Severe Convection” by Dr. Tomáš Púčik from 8 to 12 April 2019. In the past years a growing demand for this forecasting course tailored to aviation forecasters, evolved. At this moment, there are only 3 places left for this course. For autumn 2019 there is another such seminar planned.

Our high-level seminar “Dynamics and Prediction of Severe Convection” (Forecasting Severe Convection II) combines lectures from leading tornado and severe weather researcher Prof. Yvette Richardson from Penn State University in the USA, which practical forecasting exercises. This seminar is especially suited for advanced European forecasters, such as shift leaders, warning meteorologists, and to advanced students of meteorology and academic researchers with an interest in forecasting.

The full ESSL activities calendar for 2019 can be found here. 

At the recent General Assembly the ESSL Members elected a new Executive Board (EB) to take office on 1 January 2019. While Director Pieter Groenemeijer, Treasurer Alois Holzer and Deputy-Directors Kathrin Riemann-Campe and Bogdan Antonescu were re-elected for another period of 3 years, Michou Baart de la Faille was elected as a new Deputy Director.

New ESSL Deputy Director Michou Baart de la Faille

Baart de la Faille is from Utrecht in the Netherlands and 32 years old. She is a general aviation forecaster and KNMI chair of general aviation position. She contributes to the KNMI project for the improvement of its weather warning system and also participates in the ARISTOTLE project with the goal of delivering global hazardous weather information to the European Commission’s Emergency Response Coordination Center.

At ESSL she already worked for the ESSL Testbed in 2018. Her main role within the ESSL EB will be to strengthen ties to the National Hydro-Meteorological Services in Europe.

Recently, our trainer Tomáš Púčik has participated on the World Bank project “Strengthening Early Warning of Mountain Hazards in Central Asia” by giving a course on forecasting severe convection in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. Forecasters from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan participated in the course.

Púčik says that it was a very interesting experience and he enjoyed interacting with the forecasters from this part of the world.

On a related note, ESSL is planning to add Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkeminstan and Uzbekistan in the future update of ESWD. We are looking forward to start collecting more data from this region and also we hope we will be able to welcome some of the Central Asia forecasters at our Testbed activites in the future.

Trainees and their trainers in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan in late October 2018.  Photo (c) World Bank

In its latest EMS Message the European Meteorological Society introduced the ESSL to their readers. ESSL’s Director Pieter Groenemeijer provides an overview about the research as well as training and testbed activities, and he also describes the latest developments and finances.

ESSL and EMS are connected via a Memorandum of Understanding since about 10 years already. A main goal is to advertise and co-sponsor the conferences of the partner’s institution – the reason why ESSL lists the EMS Annual Meetings in its calendar of activities.

Read more here.

One of the topics of this edition is an overview of the ESWD entries for the period April to July 2018. Read the full newsletter here.

Registration for most ESSL events in 2019 including the ESSL Testbed is now open. You can find an overview of our activities here.

Brandnew training courses include a specialized seminar for convective windstorms/tornadoes and specialized seminars for aviation forecasters.

As a new service we offer a pretest in the form of an online quiz for people who are unsure which seminar to attend.

Only the ECSS registration is not yet open. Conference registration will open in late autumn 2018.

Tornado (and also very large hail) close to Vienna International Airport on 10 July 2017. Photo (c) Robert Gallina. The new seminar for aviation forecasters will concentrate on probabilistic forecasting and decision making for the aviation sector applications.

On our ESSL Testbed Blog, the presentations schedule for this week has been updated. Everyone can join these presentations remotely.

Presenters will be Helge Tuschy and Ulrich Blahak (both DWD, Germany), and Thomas August (EUMETSAT).

The latest ESSL Newsletter contains the following topics:

• ESWD summary of 2017. As an example, over 16,000 reports of severe wind gusts were entered to the database last year.
• Five new peer-reviewed publications related to ESSL research have been published recently.
• New training events have been fixed in the past few days, including tailored events for aviation meteorology.

You can download the full newsletter here.

On 11 June 2018 the new edition of the ESSL Testbed started in our ESSL Research and Training Centre in Wiener Neustadt, Austria. The ESSL Testbed is fully booked out.

You can follow our activities via our daily Testbed Blog entries here.

The Tue-Fri 9 UTC weather briefings are broadcast via BlueJeans. Please follow the instructions here to join our online briefings.

At least 34 fatalities in Wiener Neustadt tornado: Our ESSL paper on the research method for historical tornado cases just appeared in the EGU journal NHESS today:

Holzer, A. M., Schreiner, T. M. E., and Púčik, T.: A forensic re-analysis of one of the deadliest European tornadoes, Nat. Hazards Earth Syst. Sci., 18, 1555-1565, https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-18-1555-2018, 2018.

https://www.nat-hazards-earth-syst-sci.net/18/1555/2018/

(open access)