Today I have submitted to Monthly Weather Review a manuscript written together with David M. Schultz and Fiona Lomas (University of Manchester) on European tornadoes. The manuscript, a synthesis of the European tornado datasets, is also a short history of tornado observations in Europe and a literature review of the major contributions on tornado research in Europe.
There are three reasons for which we believe that this research was necessary. First, there is not a widespread recognition or the threat of tornadoes in Europe, and this lead to an underestimate of the importance of tornadoes in the current climate in Europe. Second, to better understand the climatology of tornadoes in Europe we need to understand the evolution of tornado databases for different European countries and to identifying the major influences on the development of these databases. Third, when considering the possible influence of climate change on severe convective storms, the first step is to consider the
observational data. Without knowing what is occurring now, how many tornadoes occur each
year in Europe, and what is the current spatial distribution of tornadoes, all the analyses
of the influence of climate change on tornadoes are premature.
We hoped that this manuscript of the current knowledge on tornadoes in Europe [in a way, this is a companion paper to Groenemeijer & Kühne (2014)] will encourage further discussions and stimulate the interest of the scientific community, national meteorological services and the public on European tornadoes. We hope that this would result in increased awareness, in the identification of new data sources, or in the initiation of new databases that would allow a extension of the current European tornado database both in time and in space.
You can read the draft of the paper here.