Natural hazards in Australia: storms, wind and hail.

Current and potential future storm-related wind and hail hazard in Australia is reviewed. Confidence in the current incidence of wind hazard depends upon the type of storm producing the hazard. Current hail hazard is poorly quantified in most regions of Australia. Future projections of wind hazard indicate decreases in wind hazard in northern Australia, increases along the east coast and decreases in the south, although such projections are considerably uncertain and are more uncertain for small-scale storms than for larger storms. A number of research gaps are identified and recommendations made.

Fig. 1 Ensemble composites of summer (DJF: top row) and winter (JJA: bottom row) ECLs with a maximum −1wind speed greater than 20 ms from the NARCliM ensemble for the recent past (1990–2010: left column) and the future (2060–2079: right column). Coloured contours and vectors indicate wind speed while solid line contours indicate the sea level pressure. The ensemble-mean number of events within the composite is indicated to the top-right of each panel