Binary occurrences of severe convective wind gusts for Australia using daily data, with associated environmental conditions from ERA5

Daily binary occurrences of severe convective wind gusts at 35 locations in Australia from 2005-2018, with associated environmental conditions summarised by 20 different convective diagnostics derived from ERA5 pressure level data. Severe convective gusts are not counted if a tropical cyclone is within 500 km of the gust.

Severe convective gust occurrence is defined by a daily maximum gust (3-second maximum) exceeding 25 m/s at a height of 10 m, with two or more lightning strokes in a 50 km radius within 6 hours of the gust from a combination of two separate lightning datasets.

ERA5 diagnostics are provided at the hour before each daily maximum wind gust, whether it be convective or not, representative of instantaneous conditions at the grid point closest to each station.

Data has been created by processing daily maximum wind gust data (available by request from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology; http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/data/stations/), tropical cyclone tracks (Australian Bureau of Meteorology; http://www.bom.gov.au/cyclone/tropical-cyclone-knowledge-centre/databases/), ERA5 reanalysis (Hersbach et al., 2020) and lightning data (WWLLN; Virts et al., 2013 and GPATS; available by request at http://www.gpats.com.au/). Code used to process the data exists within this repository: 

Data columns are as follows. For all columns not listed, see Brown and Dowdy (2021).

time: Timestamp from ERA5 (UTC). Daily maximum station gust for that day occurred some time between this time and the next hour.

location: Short name of BoM station which recorded gust. See Brown and Dowdy (2021) for further information on stations.

lat: Latitude of station

lon: Longitude of station

SCW: Binary occurrence of a severe convective wind gust based on the daily maximum gust.

References:

Brown, A., & Dowdy, A. (2021). Severe Convective Wind Environments and Future Projected Changes in Australia. Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, 126, e2021JD034633. https://doi.org/10.1029/2021JD034633

Hersbach, H., Bell, B., Berrisford, P., Hirahara, S., Horányi, A., Muñoz‐Sabater, J., et al. (2020), The ERA5 global reanalysis. Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, 146(730), pp.1999-2049. doi:10.1002/qj.3803

Virts, K. S., Wallace, J. M., Hutchins, M. L., & Holzworth, R. H. (2013), Highlights of a new ground-based, hourly global lightning climatology. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 94(9), 1381–1391.