The Mobiliar Lab for Natural Risks is currently investigating the first observations from the Swiss Hail Network Project, a network of 80 automatic hail sensors installed between 2018 and 2020 in the three most hail-prone regions of Switzerland: the Jura, the Napf and Ticino. Those sensors provide new information about the timing of hailfall and hailstones individual impacts, allowing to obtain a time-resolved hail size distribution (HSD). More specifically, the questions we would like to investigate are the following:
- What is the point (local) duration of hailfalls in Switzerland and when do they happen? Are there differences between regions? How does it compare with existing literature estimates?
- What is the point time-resolved HSD measured by sensors? Are there similar/different patterns (no patterns) globally and by region?
- How do sensors observations compare with traditional hailpads observations? What can we learn from this comparison?
- What are the strengths and potential limitations of automatic hail sensors? How to make best use of them in conjunction with other hail observing systems?
