A Radar-Based Hail Climatology for the CONUS (2000–2011)

The National Severe Storms Laboratory and National Climatic Data Center have partnered the past 2 years to reprocess all of the WSR-88D data through the Warning Decision Support System—Integrated Information (WDSS-II) software suite to produce merged reflectivity grids with a horizontal grid spacing of 0.01 degrees in latitude and longitude and with varying vertical resolution, with finer layers near the surface. The merged reflectivity data is combined with near storm environment data, such as the melting layer height, to produce derived products such as the Maximum Estimated Size of Hail (MESH), which comes from a gridded version of the Hail Detection Algorithm. This presentation will focus on the quality control process of the hail data and the generation of climatologies highlighting general hail, severe hail and significant-severe hail risk. Discussions on future work investigating more minute details of the climatology and comparisons to Storm Data will also be included.