A 23-Year Severe Hail Climatology Using GridRad MESH Observations

Assessments of spatiotemporal severe hailfall characteristics using hail reports are plagued by serious limitations in report databases, including biases in reported sizes, occurrence time, and location. Multiple studies have used Next Generation Weather Radar (NEXRAD) network observations or environmental hail proxies from reanalyses. Previous work has specifically utilized the single-polarization radar parameter maximum expected size of hail (MESH). In addition to previous work being temporally limited, updates are needed to include recent improvements that have been made to MESH. This study aims to quantify severe hailfall characteristics during a 23-yr period, markedly longer than previous studies, using both radar observations and reanalysis data. First, the improved MESH configuration is applied to the full archive of gridded hourly radar observations known as GridRad (1995-2017). Next, environmental constraints from the Modern-Era Retrospective Analysis for Research and Applications, version 2, are applied to the MESH distributions to produce a corrected hailfall climatology that accounts for the reduced likelihood of hail reaching the ground. Spatial, diurnal, and seasonal patterns show that in contrast to the report climatology indicating one high-frequency hail maximum centered on the Great Plains, the MESH-only method characterizes two regions: the Great Plains and the Gulf Coast. The environmentally filtered MESH climatology reveals improved agreement between report characteristics (frequency, location, and timing) and the recently improved MESH calculation methods, and it reveals an overall increase in diagnosed hail days and westward broadening in the spatial maximum in the Great Plains than that seen in reports.