Often, even if not always, atmospheric hazards occur at small temporal and spatial scales. This is clearly evident for deep convection-related phenomena (flash floods, hailstorms, tornadoes, lightning strikes, etc.) or site specific events (gravity waves breaking, storm surges, etc.). On the other hand, even for large scale severe events, local anomalies play a relevant role, as it was shown dramatically during the extreme temperatures of 2003 summer in Paris, when positioning of rooms and houses highly increased the dangerous effects for human health. For that reason, following the “fil rouge” of 2009 edition of the EMS annual meeting and ECAM conference, this session fosters contributions devoted to the high resolution aspects of “Atmospheric Hazards” in particular studies, and forecasts as well as the applications and services dealing with their impacts on human activities and the environment.
In detail this session will leave room to all the works facing the following:
1) extreme cold/heat episodes;
2) freezing rain and intense or anomalous snow episodes;
3) severe katabatic or foehn winds;
4) gap flows;
5) fog (in particular microphysics aspects);
6) breaking of gravity waves;
7) storm-surges and atmospheric driven marine hazards;
8) flash-floods and heavy rain events;
9) hail;
10) lightning;
11) tornadoes, waterspouts, derechos and downbursts;
12) intense Mediterranean cyclones;
13) tropical like cyclones
14) local effects of polar lows.
15) Severe wind storms

Particularly welcome will be those contributions dealing with the study of specific episodes (case studies) considered relevant and archetypical by the authors. Highly appreciated will be those case studies which might be useful for the development of new forecasting procedures and/or conceptual models. Case studies devoted to “freaky events” which can represent a trouble for the already existing conceptual models will be appreciated as well.

Contributions focused on new techniques, or new applications, of detection techniques (e.g, RADAR, Satellite, convolution of RADAR, satellite and lightning detection, etc.) are of great interest for this session. Furthermore numerical modelling of atmospheric hazardous phenomena are particularly encourages.

The above presented list of topics is, of course, not exhaustive and the “Atmospheric Hazards” session will supply room even to all the other aspects of atmospheric hazards sprung out from human imagination and not encompassed into the above description.