Wind INduced Disturbances in Forests At Local and RegionaL Scales (WINDFALLS) - Meteorology

Overall objective of WINDFALLS is to develop a methodology to “translate” weather model and RCM simulations into wind speed proxies that can then be used in forest disturbance modeling. Specifically, this includes the following technical objectives: (1) Collection of a spatial data base of (a) verified wind damages in forests from different storm type events, and (b) wind speed data from different meteorological sources (weather station data, weather models, RCM climate change simulations) (2) Simulation of storm events with high resolution weather models to investigate the capability of weather models to reproduce realistic wind field structures during extreme events (Föhn, Atlantic storms, thunder storms) for the observed damages. (3) Find proxies for wind speed at the spatial scale of regional climate models of ~ 10 km (e.g. pressure gradient, lability index …) that can represent wind speed thresholds for wind damage in forests (4) Validate the developed wind speed proxies by refitting predictive wind damage models from different regions in Austria (5) Translate RCM climate change simulations into wind speed proxies and demonstrate the use of RCM climate change scenario runs in forest disturbance modelling WINDFALLS-Met is focusing on the meteorological aspects within this project.