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IPMA article selected for Cover story of scientific journal newsletter

New 2020-08-14 (IPMA)

The paper entitled Damaging Convective and Non-Convective Winds in Southwestern Iberia during Windstorm Xola, recently published in the Atmosphere (MDPI), resulted from the cooperation between the Meteorological Forecast and Surveillance (DivMV) and Aeronautical Meteorology (DivMA) divisions. The Atmosphere editors have selected this paper as the cover story of the July 2020 edition.

The work aims to contribute to the knowledge of the characteristics of strong wind phenomena specifically associated with windstorms. On 23 December 2009 the windstorm Xola caused extensive damages in two small regions of Mainland Portugal. In Algarve, the damaging winds were caused by a mesovortex (atmospheric vortex with organized rotation and a horizontal scale of the order of 5-15km, associated with thunderstorm) embedded in a upper cold front. In the Western region, the massive destruction of several structures was associated with a Sting jet (SJ).

This article provides the first evidence a SJ south of the 40°N parallel and shows that the phenomenology involved revealed several feature different from those documented by the scientific community in other cases of SJ observed in the European continent at higher latitudes. The recognition of these specificities can contribute, from an operational point of view, to improve the very short-term weather forecast (Nowcasting forecast) of these phenomena.

Cover story link: