the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
| 11 Feb 2025
Brief communication: How extreme was the thunderstorm rain in Vienna on 17 August 2024? A temporal and spatial analysis
Abstract. On 17 August 2024, a single thunderstorm cell in Vienna/Austria led to a rainfall of 107 mm/2 h at the weather station of "Hohe Warte", which has been monitoring hourly precipitation since 1941 – one of the world's longest-running precipitation time series at this temporal resolution. A comparison with other gauging stations in the area indicates that this amount of rainfall almost doubles the second-largest event. A conservative estimate of the return period of this event is approx. 662 years. Full spatial analysis was conducted on the radar-based INCA data set, showing that the 20-year return value on a grid cell level ranges between 28–69 mm/2 h, further highlighting the rarity of this event.
- Preprint
(1482 KB) - Metadata XML
-
Supplement
(532 KB) - BibTeX
- EndNote
Status: open (until 25 Mar 2025)
-
RC1: 'Comment on nhess-2024-224', Anonymous Referee #1, 21 Feb 2025
reply
The manuscript provides an analysis of the rainfall event on 17 August 2024 in Vienna Austria. To assess the extremeness of the event two datasets have been used: Rain gauge data from weather stations with long records but limited spatial representativeness and the radar-based INCA dataset with spatial coverage but short time series. Both datasets revealed that the event on 17 August 2024 was extraordinary with a rainfall of 107 mm/2h and return periods in the range of several 100 years.
The study fits in the scope of the brief communication format of NHESS. It is well written, the goal and methods are clearly explained and the results are easy to follow and well illustrated. I recommend publishing the manuscript after addressing the following remarks:P.3, L.54: What would happen in the unlikely case of an event around midnight? Is the independence of events still guaranteed?
P.3, L.63: Isn't the INCA dataset also shorter than 25 years (2004-2023)? Why were annual maxima used instead of POT?
P.3, L.68: Please explain the abbreviation HRV, because it is used here for the first time.
P.3, L.72: I guess, “trough” is meant here instead of “through”?
P.4, L.94: Inner Stadt may not be clear to a read who isn’t familiar with the city of Vienna. Maybe the authors could explain a bit more about the location.
P.4, L.108: Just out of curiosity: How would the return period of the event change when it would be included in the time series?
P.5, Fig. 1b: A line indicating the 25% and 75% percentile would be helpful to show because it is mentioned in the text.Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-2024-224-RC1
Data sets
How extreme was the thunderstorm rain in Vienna on 17 August 2024? INCA Data and station data. F. Lehner, J. Laimighofer, and V. Klaus https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14500708
Model code and software
precipAnalysis V. Klaus, F. Lehner, and J. Laimighofer https://github.com/katelbach/precipAnalysis
Viewed
| HTML | XML | Total | Supplement | BibTeX | EndNote | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 63 | 17 | 2 | 82 | 10 | 2 | 2 |
- HTML: 63
- PDF: 17
- XML: 2
- Total: 82
- Supplement: 10
- BibTeX: 2
- EndNote: 2
Viewed (geographical distribution)
| Country | # | Views | % |
|---|
| Total: | 0 |
| HTML: | 0 |
| PDF: | 0 |
| XML: | 0 |
- 1