Long-lived Severe Convective Windstorms in Northern Eurasia in 2022: Formation Environments and Short-term Forecasting Using the WRF Model

The present study considers four cases of long-lived (with a path length above 100 km) severe convective windstorms observed in the forest zone of Russia (in European Russia and Siberia) during the warm season of 2022. An analysis of the formation environments and the quality of windstorm forecasts with different lead times according to the WRF atmospheric model with the use of the KIAPS SAS convection parameterization scheme is carried out. All the windstorms caused a large-scale forest damage, which suggests hurricane wind gusts. Despite the differences in the formation environments of the windstorm events, a common feature is the combination of moderate or strong convective instability with a strong wind shear in the layers of 0–6 and 0–3 km, as well high values of the supercell composite parameter, which is favorable for the development of long-lived convective storms. The quality of the WRF model forecasts of windstorm events is independent of lead time, but is determined by the type of convective storms and formation environments. Only one of the four windstorms was successfully predicted at any lead time. In most cases, the model underestimates wind gusts, but the number of missed events in the sample was the same as the number of false alarms. The average value of the extremal dependence index for the analyzed cases is 0.56.