The Swiss Hail Network

Purpose of the Swiss Hail Network

The purpose of the Swiss Hail Network is to record for the first time the impact energy, grain size distribution and precise time of hailstorms thanks to new sensors, and in doing so create a data set for improving our understanding and the monitoring, measurement, warning, short-term forecasting and climatology of hailstorms in order to reduce hail damage in the long term.

This purpose is served by the combination of hail information from weather radar data, observations from the population, data on hail damage to vehicles and data from the automatic hail sensors, which is new and unique worldwide.

The Measuring Network

The hail reporting function in the MeteoSwiss app, where users can record their hail observations, has provided valuable information to researchers since 2015. Over 250,000 of the reports collected so far are of great importance for improving hail warnings. Thanks to the measuring network, additional important parameters and data can be collected.

The Swiss hail measurement network has been funded by Mobiliar since 2018 with an amount of approximately 1.45 million Swiss francs as part of its corporate commitment. Mobiliar provides the data free of charge to the Mobiliar Lab for Natural Risks at the University of Bern, the Federal Office of Meteorology and Climatology MeteoSwiss, and other partner institutions in the scientific community. The data is scientifically extremely valuable, especially in combination with data from MeteoSwiss' weather radars and hail reports from the public. They enable the improvement of radar-based hail data from MeteoSchweiz and the derivation of new hail data sets, for example, a data set on the size distribution of hail. The combination of modern weather radars by MeteoSwiss, hail sensor measurement data, and hail reports from the public is unique worldwide and makes Switzerland a leading laboratory for hail research.

The Sensor

The "HailSens IoT" hail sensor consists of a 50 cm diameter Makrolon disc. The Makrolon disc begins to vibrate when a hailstone hits it. The vibrations are recorded by a highly sensitive microphone. The hail sensors measure the kinetic energy, the size of the hail, and the time of the hail strike. The data is transmitted in real-time to a central location at MeteoSwiss via the mobile network. The company inNET Monitoring AG from Altdorf is responsible for the setup and maintenance of the sensors.

More information about the sensor is available here.

Parties involved