Towards a South American High Impact Weather Reports Database

Abstract

Despite Southern South America being recognized as a hotspot for deep convective storms, little is known about the socio-environmental impacts of high impact weather (HIW) events. Although there have been past efforts to collect severe weather reports in the region, they have been highly fragmented among and within countries, sharing no common protocol, and limited to a particular phenomenon, a very specific region or a short period of time.There is a pressing need for a more comprehensive understanding of the present risks linked to HIW events, specifically deep convective storms, on a global scale as well as their variability and potential future evolution in the context of climate change. A database of high-quality and systematic HIW reports and associated socio-environmental impacts is essential to understand the regional atmospheric conditions leading to hazardous weather, to quantify its predictability and to build robust early warning systems.To tackle this problem and following successful initiatives in other regions of the world, researchers, national weather service members, and weather enthusiasts from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay have embarked on a multi-national collaboration to generate a standardized database of reports of HIW events principally associated with convective storms and their socio-environmental impacts in South America. The goal of this paper is to describe this unprecedented initiative over the region, to summarize first results and to discuss the potential applications of this collaboration.