Maximum hailstone size: Relationship with meteorological variables

The damage caused to property by hail mainly depends on the size of the hailstones. This paper explores the possibility of forecasting the maximum hailstone size registered on a particular day using sounding data. The data employed for the study are those provided by hail events registered over an 11-year period in the hailpad network in the plain of Friuli-Venezia-Giulia, in Italy. As for the description of the atmosphere, the most common weather variables (stability indices, layer thickness, kinetic variables, temperatures, etc.) were obtained from the daily sounding carried out at Udine, a city almost in the middle of the Friulian plain. Only the days with sounding data and with dents on the hailpads were considered for the study: a minimum of 10 dents per plate was established as the lower threshold. The final sample that fulfilled these conditions included 313 days. A detailed study was carried out on the relationship between the weather variables before the hail event and daily data on hail size. The results show that the variable that relates best to hail size is the drop in surface pressure in the 12 h immediately prior to the hail event, as well as the lifted index. Principal component analysis was applied to the weather variables. The first eight principal components were used together with the drop in pressure to establish a linear forecast model. The result improves considerably when the smaller hailstones are not considered, with sizes smaller than 10 or 15 mm.