Tornadic events in the Iberian Peninsula and Balearic Islands: characteristics and environmental conditions
[eng] Tornadoes are the meteorological phenomenon which can produce the strongest surface wind on Earth, causing damage, injuries and fatalities. Several studies show that severe storm environments could be more frequent due to global warming, especially during the second half of the century. Thus,...
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| Formato: | tesis doctoral |
| Estado: | Versión publicada |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2021 |
| País: | España |
| Recursos: | Universidad de Barcelona |
| Repositorio: | Dipòsit Digital de la UB |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:diposit.ub.edu:2445/178019 |
| Acesso em linha: | https://hdl.handle.net/2445/178019 http://hdl.handle.net/10803/671823 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palavra-chave: | Física atmosfèrica Tornados Temps (Meteorologia) Atmospheric physics Tornadoes Weather |
| Resumo: | [eng] Tornadoes are the meteorological phenomenon which can produce the strongest surface wind on Earth, causing damage, injuries and fatalities. Several studies show that severe storm environments could be more frequent due to global warming, especially during the second half of the century. Thus, it is necessary to deep on tornado knowledge. The main aim of this thesis is to study tornadic events in the Iberian Peninsula and Balearic Islands both to characterise them and to describe favourable conditions for tornadogenesis. The work is divided into three different blocks. In the first part, a methodology to conduct wind damage field surveys for high-impact weather events of convective origin has been proposed. Moreover, orthophotographs have been used to identify areas affected by damaging winds, through the comparison of images taken before and after case studies. With both methods it is usually possible to know which phenomenon occurred (i.e. tornado or downburst) by studying the damage pattern, and to provide relevant data to complete severe weather databases. In the second part, a tornado and waterspout database for Catalonia is built up, containing 434 cases for the period 2000-2019. In addition, an analysis of characteristics of tornadic events is also performed. In the third part, sounding data has been used to describe different weather types in Catalonia, including days with tornadoes, by the calculation of several thermodynamic, kinematic and composite parameters. Furthermore, vertical temperature, humidity and wind profiles from tornado and waterspout events registered in the Iberian Peninsula and Balearic Islands between 1980 and 2018 have been analysed using ERA5 reanalysis Finally, Szilagyi nomogram has been tested to detect waterspout-related environments. Results may contribute to enhance the detection and analysis of damaged areas due to strong- convective winds in the Iberian Peninsula and Balearic Islands. The tools presented here help to build up robust and homogeneous databases, and the analysis of favourable conditions for tornadogenesis carried out may be useful for forecasting and surveillance tasks. The improvement of typical tornadic environments detection is especially interesting for the area of study, as contains some of the regions where tornadoes are the most frequent in southern Europe. |
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