Sustainability
Largest hailstone found
For ten years, the Mobiliar Lab for Natural Risks at the University of Bern has been working at the interface of science and practice, researching how hail, floods and storms occur, how damage can be reduced, and developing tools for the better handling of natural risks. To mark the anniversary, photos of large hailstones were sought in a competition, with the winning hailstone measuring almost 5 cm.
One of the key areas of research of the Mobiliar Lab is hail. In Switzerland, it causes damage running into millions every year, is difficult to predict and is still comparatively poorly researched. One of the reasons for this is a lack of measurement and observation data, as hail occurs in strong thunderstorms that occur only for a limited period of time and on a very small scale.
With this in mind, the Mobiliar Lab has developed a hail alarm function integrated in the MeteoSwiss app. More than 270,000 reports of local hail incidents have been received to date. This data is used to develop new radar-based tools for more precise hail forecasting and to continuously improve existing hail forecasting tools. To mark its 10th anniversary, the Mobiliar Lab launched a new information platform on the subject of hail.