Feature-based classification of European windstorms

Scientific work on European windstorms mainly focused on local damages, location (tracks), temporal evolution or the overall severity, often measured by severity indices of different definitions. Each of the aforementioned windstorm properties is directly related to important characteristics within the windstorm itself, such as wind speed, duration, spatial extent or internal variablity. Variation or changes within these characteritics are therefore defining aspects in the spatial and temproal evolution of windstorm or their overall severity in general. As a step towards a better understanding of such variations, we intend to classify windstorms based on their characteristics. For this purpose, we categorize individual storms based on their characteristics using a K-Means clustering procedure. As a result, we get a catalog of more than 400 storm tracks, each track having properties similar to the 20 most severe storm events in the European region. In an attempt to better understand driving mechanisms behind severe European windstorms, the catalog will be further examined to find key parameters that determine the cluster characteristics, such as large-scale situations or the sequencing of clusters.