Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci. Discuss., doi:10.5194/hess-2016-177, 2016 Manuscript under review for journal Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci. Published: 14 June 2016 c Author(s) 2016. CC-BY 3.0 License. Hail storm hazard in urban areas: identification and probability of occurrence by using a single-polarization X-band weather radar Vincenzo Capozzi1, Errico Picciotti2, Vincenzo Mazzarella1, Giorgio Budillon1, Frank Silvio Marzano2,3 1 Department of Science and Technology, University of Naples “Parthenope”, Centro Direzionale di Napoli, 80143, Italy 5 2 Centre of Excellence CETEMPS, University of L’Aquila, 67100, Italy 3 Dept. of Information Engineering, Sapienza University of Rome, 00184, Italy Correspondence to: V. Capozzi (
[email protected]) Abstract. This work exploits the potentiality of hail warning, based on single-polarization X-band weather radar measurements and tested on a large and well-documented data set of thunderstorm events in southern Italy near Naples. Even though X-band 10 radars may suffer of two-way path attenuation especially at long ranges, due to their relatively low cost their use is rapidly increasing for short-range applications such as urban environments. To identify hail through radar measurements, two different methodologies have been selected and adapted to X-band data within the study area: one uses the Waldvogel (WAL) approach, whereas the other one uses the Vertically-Integrated Liquid Density (VIL-Density) product. The study aims at developing a Probability-of-Hail (POH) index in order to support hail risk management at urban scales. In order to find the optimal threshold 15 values to discriminate between hail and severe rain, an extensive intercomparison between outcomes of the two methodologies and ground truth observations of hail has been performed, using a 2x2 contingency table and statistical scores.