Sarah Bang (NASA MSFC) and Kristopher Bedka (NASA LaRC) were co-authors on a paper authored by Heinz-Jürgen Punge, Michael Kunz, and Kyle Itterly. The paper explores the creations of an event catalog of the hail hazard in South Africa guided by 14 years of geostationary satellite observations of convective storms. Overshooting cloud tops have been detected, grouped, and tracked to describe the spatiotemporal extent of potential hail events, and compared against the passive-microwave hail climatology. It is found that hail events concentrate mainly in the southeast of the country, along the Highveld, and around the eastern slopes. Events are most frequent from mid-November through February and peak in the afternoon, between 13:00 and 17:00 UTC. Multivariate stochastic modeling of event properties yields an event catalog spanning 25 000 years, aiming to estimate, in combination with vulnerability and exposure data, hail risk for return periods of 200 years.
The paper is available at: https://nhess.copernicus.org/articles/23/1549/2023/nhess-23-1549-2023.html.
