European Severe Storms Laboratory 20th anniversary

This year, the European Severe Storms Laboratory (ESSL), turns 20! A nonprofit research organisation dedicated to severe convective storm research and education was formally founded in September 2006. However, the idea behind this initiative had emerged several years earlier. In 2000, the vision of more coordinated severe storm research and enhanced exchange of knowledge on severe convection was presented by Dr Nikolai Dotzek at the Conference on European Tornadoes and Severe Storms in Toulouse, followed by the establishment of an informal network in 2002. Through his vision of creating a European centre of competence for severe storms and his exceptional ability to connect researchers across national borders, Dotzek became the driving force behind the creation of ESSL and the development of a strong European severe weather community.

Parallel to these initiatives aiming to coordinate the study of extreme weather across Europe, several ideas and activities were underway regarding the collection of reports on severe convective weather events such as tornadoes and large hail. The TorDACH network for the collection of storm reports from Germany, Austria and Switzerland was launched in 1997 by Nikolai Dotzek, Alois Holzer and Willi Schmid. Inspired by this network and similar initiatives in Spain and Italy, the European Severe Weather Database (ESWD) was established in 2004. The ESWD was closely linked to the European Storm Forecast Experiment (ESTOFEX), an initiative of young European meteorologists and meteorology students attempting to forecast severe convective storms and lightning across Europe. The publicly accessible ESWD allowed anyone to submit and access reports, and over time the database gained increasing value, especially through the efforts of Thilo Kühne, its most prolific volunteer contributor. The continued success of the ESWD would not be possible without its network of Volunteer Observers and Volunteer Observing Networks (VOPs and VONs), whose contributions account for a substantial share of the reports contained in the database. The ESWD is one of the pillars of ESSL and one of its statutory activities, alongside advancing meteorological research on severe convective storms and extreme weather events and supporting the organisation of the European Conference on Severe Storms (ECSS).

The German Weather Service (DWD) was the first national weather service to become an institutional member of ESSL in 2007. With funding from DWD, the ESWD database was redesigned. In 2016, when ESSL celebrated its tenth anniversary, the ESWD contained 100,000 severe weather reports, while at the beginning of 2026 it surpassed half a million reports. Over the years, the ESWD has become an extremely valuable resource used in approximately 400 scientific publications on topics ranging from hail detection by radar or satellite to the impact of severe weather on people’s attitudes towards natural disasters. In addition, ESSL’s institutional members make widespread use of the ESWD for risk assessments and verifying weather forecasts, while their membership fees help sustain the operation of the database. At ESSL, the ESWD is an essential dataset for the development of its suite of Additive Regression Convective Hazard Models (AR-CHaMo) for the estimation of storm probability and for the ESSL Testbeds, which have been taking place continuously since 2012 at the ESSL Research and Training Centre in Wiener Neustadt.

Following the sudden death of ESSL founder and director Dr Nikolai Dotzek in 2010, the ESSL Executive Board advised by US severe storm expert Dr Charles Doswell III decided to establish a place where severe thunderstorm experts from around the world could meet for testbeds and workshops. Wiener Neustadt emerged as a natural choice for such a training centre due to its central location and its meteorological history, having been struck by a destructive IF4 tornado in 1916.

In the years that followed, the ESSL Research and Training Centre developed into a hub for knowledge exchange and innovation through expert workshops, exploring various aspects of severe convective storms while testing and demonstrating new forecasting tools and products. In particular, since 2020, multi-year collaborations with EUMETSAT and ECMWF developed. With EUMETSAT, ESSL’s role is to investigate new satellite data products that become available as part of the Meteosat Third Generation of satellites and introduce forecasters to them, while with ECMWF, ESSL has been developing probabilistic forecasts of severe weather hazards such as hail and thunderstorm winds. For the purposes of training and product evaluation, the ESSL Weather Data Displayer and Radar Displayer were developed as platforms for visualising and analysing meteorological data.

Hundreds of meteorologists and scientists have passed through the premises of the training centre since then, whether as a participant to an ESSL Testbed, workshop, or a course on forecasting storms led by senior trainer Tomas Pucik or any of his colleagues. Some have become regular participants, which signals that they feel welcome and find the training activities useful. Some even joined ESSL’s small team of currently 15 people, some of whom work voluntarily and some only a limited number of hours per week. Many others remain close collaborators and friends of ESSL, reflecting the strong community that has developed around the organisation over the past two decades.

Ever since its foundation ESSL has been growing slowly but steadily. Many national meteorological and hydrological services have joined as members since 2006, totalling 32 full members by its twentieth anniversary. This clearly demonstrates how relevant and important ESSL has become in the field of severe storm research. ESSL continues to advance the science of severe storms and strengthen the resilience of European communities to high-impact weather events, also through the organisation of the European Conference on Severe Storms (ECSS). The most recent conference was held in Utrecht in 2025 and attracted a record-breaking 350 participants from 41 countries, featuring more than 200 posters and 80 presentations. Preparations for the next edition of ECSS are already underway, and the ESSL team is look forward to welcoming colleagues from the European meteorological community in Genoa in October 2027.

It is also worth mentioning that ESSL is currently leading the initiative for a large-scale multi-year field campaign named TIM (Thunderstorm Intensification from Mountains to Plains), aimed at collecting data on severe storms to improve our understanding of their evolution near mountain ranges.

In the coming years, we hope to continue our steady growth, enabling us to further improve our work in support of our statutory goals. We remain committed to our long-term vision of improving the preparedness of European society for the impacts of severe storms by advancing scientific understanding, building human capacity, and fostering cooperation across Europe in this field. Through our training activities, we will continue to support forecasters, scientists and policymakers in developing the knowledge and skills needed to meet future challenges.

We also look forward to further strengthening our cooperation with national meteorological and hydrological services, research institutes, universities and other partners, whose support and collaboration have been essential to ESSL’s success over the past twenty years. Together, we can continue to build a stronger and more resilient severe weather community in Europe.

The ESSL Executive Board