Truer extreme weather forecasts come rain hail or shine

New research may lead to more accurate forecasts for extreme weather events across Australia. Video by University of Queensland via AAP.

Transcript

00:00So, the work that we're doing here, first and foremost, it benefits forecasters, which

00:04provide warning information out to the general public to act safely during hailstorms and

00:09mitigate damage.

00:10We have these weather prediction models which are able to, we say, explicitly predict hailstones.

00:16And this means we have individual hailstones being modelled inside an understorm.

00:21Traditionally, this is done by assuming the hailstones are spheres, just round balls.

00:26But when we start using this shape information we're collecting, all the properties of the

00:30hail changes.

00:31It tumbles, it collects water differently, it melts differently.

00:35And we see those properties, incorporating them, changes the way the hail moves in the

00:39cloud and how big it grows.

00:41The end game is to have these natural hailstones in a model and able to run this model in real

00:47time as we get radar data in and more model data.

00:50This allows us to produce short-term predictions, so on the order of half an hour out to the

00:55future.

00:56And that's what really matters, because we have high accuracy then.

01:00And with this new data, we're able to more accurately predict the hail size and landing

01:04location.