On August 31, 2022, a brutal hailstorm struck the small Spanish city of La Bisbal d’Empordà. The storm unleashed balls of ice up to 12 centimeters wide, causing widespread damage to property and crops, injuring dozens of people and killing a 20-month-old toddler. Computer simulations now suggest that in a preindustrial climate,The study is the first to establish a link between climate change and a specific hailstorm.
To see how the storm might have behaved in a world with a different climate, the researchers used computer simulations to re-create the storm under different circumstances. In one simulation, for example, the team lowered the sea temperature to the average for that time of the year. In another, they also changed atmospheric parameters to preindustrial levels, tweaking things such as air temperature, relative humidity and wind.
One problem, she says, is that the computer simulations used in this study can´t directly compute the hail size produced by a storm. Instead, scientists must estimate a storm’s hail-forming potential based on parameters such as wind speed, atmospheric stability and air temperature. As a result, what researchers can really evaluate is the likelihood of forming a certain hail size under a particular set of conditions.