How observations from automatic hail sensors in Switzerland shed light on local hailfall duration and compare with hailpad measurements

Abstract

Measuring the properties of hailstorms is a difficult task due to the rarity and mainly small spatial extent of the events. Especially, hail observations from ground-based time-recording instruments are scarce. We present the first study of extended field observations made by a network of 80 automatic hail sensors from Switzerland. The main benefits of the sensors are the live recording of the hailstone kinetic energy and the precise timing of the impacts. Its potential limitations include a diameter-dependent dead time, which results in less than 5 % of missed impacts, and the possible recording of impacts that are not due to hail, which can be filtered using a radar reflectivity filter. We assess the robustness of the sensors' measurements by doing a statistical comparison of the sensor observations with hailpad observations, and we show that, despite their different measurement approaches, both devices measure the same hail size distributions. We then use the timing information to measure the local duration of hail events, the cumulative time distribution of impacts, and the time of the largest hailstone during a hail event. We find that 75 % of local hailfalls last just a few minutes (from less than 4.4 min to less than 7.7 min, depending on a parameter to delineate the events) and that 75 % of the impacts occur in less than 3.3 min to less than 4.7 min. This time distribution suggests that most hailstones, including the largest, fall during a first phase of high hailstone density, while a few remaining and smaller hailstones fall in a second low-density phase.