UNIVERSITY OF BUCHAREST
FACULTY OF PHYSICS

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2024-11-23 17:37
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Conference: Bucharest University Faculty of Physics 2022 Meeting


Section: Atmosphere and Earth Science; Environment Protection


Title:
Severe weather: tornadoes in Romania


Authors:
Andreea BĂRĂSCU (1), Bogdan ANTONESCU (2), Mihai DIMA (1)


Affiliation:
1) Faculty of Physics, University of Bucharest

2) National Institute for Research and Development in Optoelectronics INOE 2000, Magurele, Romania



E-mail
andreea.barascu.vd@gmail.com


Keywords:
severe weather, tornadoes, atmospheric instability


Abstract:
In the past years, the tornadoes in Europe have been an underestimated threat. Tornado Alley is not the only place in the world where tornadoes form. Although these severe weather phenomena can negatively impact the population, infrastructure, and agricultural lands, and sometimes they even produce significant damage and life losses, many things about their formation are not understood yet. There were about 150 reported tornadoes in Romania between 1955 and 2019, but there might have been much more unreported. We used vertical soundings of the atmosphere (obtained from thundeR Era 5 sigma levels for Europe) of these meteorological events in order to analyze and identify the parameters that are most important for tornadoes especially for the ones in our country. Then we synthesized the range of values for eight specific parameters acquired in three different ways and also compared them with the range of values in other countries in Europe and the USA. From the available data existing in Romania, it resulted that the majority of evaluated tornadoes on the Fujita scale produce light to moderate damage (F0, F1), some produce considerable damage (F2), and there are very few cases of F3 tornadoes that produce severe damage (only one is evaluated as an F3 in the database I used). Therefore, one of the next steps is to find more pieces of information (like damage imagery, witness testimonies, and media reports) about the tornadoes that unfortunately are not evaluated so far and evaluate them on the Fujita scale to verify the results on a more extensive data set.