Global Warming - Bigger Hail: Attribution Study Links $350 Million In Damage From Paris Storm To Warming Trend
Regions that are often pummeled by severe storms—like the Midwestern United States under last weekend’s powerful thunderstorms and deadly tornadoes—could also face the threat of more extreme hail. New research published Monday in Atmospheric Science Letters for the first time linked human-caused warming with the size of hailstones in a single thunderstorm. The study examined a May 3 storm that pelted Paris and other parts of France with hail ranging in size from marbles to golfballs, destroying or damaging more than $350 million worth of property.. The researchers compared real-time data from May 3 with dozens of similar weather patterns from past decades to isolate how a warmer atmosphere changed the storm’s ingredients.
The analysis shows that, in France and Germany, the probability of hail under similar atmospheric conditions has increased by up to 30 percent. And warming made the hailstones grow from nuisance-size to chunks of ice big enough to shred crops and damage cars and structures.The Paris storm formed in a weather pattern similar to those that fuel severe weather across the U.S. Midwest or South, when warm, moisture-laden air surges northward and meets cooler air masses beneath strong winds high in the atmosphere. When those ingredients combine, powerful updrafts can develop inside thunderstorms, allowing hailstones to bounce repeatedly through freezing layers in the clouds and grow larger before falling to the ground. The seasonal collision of air masses that generates intense storms is growing more volatile in a warmer and wetter world. And this winter’s extremes, with frigid snows in parts of the East and renewed drought and heat in the West, helped prime the atmosphere over North America for the March 5-7 storms that killed at least eight people and left a trail of climate scars, from an unseasonably powerful tornado in Michigan to softball-size hail in South Texas.
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Along with other recent research, the new findings show that hail is not a marginal or localized hazard, lead author Davide Faranda, a research director at France’s National Center for Scientific Research, wrote via email. With global warming, hailstorms are becoming more damaging and affecting wider areas, including major cities, he noted.
“Understanding how climate change amplifies these risks is essential for anticipating impacts and improving preparedness,” he wrote, adding that the timing of hailstorms is still mostly driven by natural weather patterns, but global warming is amplifying their punch when they develop. Instead of trying to simulate the May 3 storm, Faranda and co-author Tommaso Alberti focused on the large-scale weather pattern that produced it. Because that setup occurs regularly over western Europe and the region is densely monitored, they were able to compare what happened in the Paris hailstorm with dozens of earlier storms that developed under nearly identical conditions, and to answer the question of how that was affected by warming.
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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/09032026/warming-intensifies-hail-thunderstorms/
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