An Improved Instability-Shear Hail Proxy for Australia

We evaluated the performance in Australia of proxies designed to identify atmospheric conditions prone to hail and severe storms. In a convection-resolving but short-duration simulation, proxies that use instability and wind shear thresholds overestimated the probability of hail occurring when compared to the estimated occurrence of surface graupel in the model, particularly in Australia's tropical north. We used reanalysis data and the Australian Bureau of Meteorology severe storm archive to examine atmospheric conditions at times and locations when hailstorms, other storms, and no storms were reported between January 1979 and March 2021. In instability-shear space, the best discriminator between hail and no-storm times was found to vary predictably with melting-level height, allowing a new proxy to better represent latitudinal trends in atmospheric conditions. We found extra conditions that can be applied to the new proxy to efficiently reduce the number of false alarms. The new proxy outperforms the tested existing proxies for detection of hail-prone conditions in Australia.