[1][2] The ESSL focuses on research questions concerning convective storms and other extreme weather phenomena which can be treated more efficiently on a pan-European scale.

[4] The statutory purposes of the ESSL are: The European Severe Weather Database (ESWD) collects and verifies reports on dust, sand- or steam devils, tornadoes, gustnadoes, large hail, heavy rain and snowfall, severe wind gusts, damaging lightning strikes and avalanches all over Europe and around the Mediterranean.

Extraordinary work has been performed to verify the validity of all pieces of information given in a certain report based on detailed case studies on a scientific level.

[10][11] Weather forecasters have to deal with the problem that satellites cannot see what happens under a storm cloud, radars do not scan close to the Earth’s surface and that measurements from their observation stations are far apart.

[12] During the ECSS two prices are offered: The ESSL Testbed is an annually returning event with the aim to enhance severe weather forecasting across Europe.

[16] ESSL is part of the ClimXtreme research network, funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research and carries out the project CHECC, part of ClimXtreme Module B. Convective hazards such as large hail, severe wind gusts, tornadoes and heavy rainfall are responsible for high economic damages, fatalities and injuries across the world, in Europe, and in Germany.

These conclusions are in part based on work with Additive Regression Convective Hazard Models (AR-CHaMo) that have been developed using state-of-the-art reanalysis data and observations collected in the European Severe Weather Database (ESWD).

More improvement is expected from additional observational data that is retrieved from media archives and thus enhances the severe weather database used for training the models.

As part of this section of the study, predictor parameters will need to be modified owing to the higher spatial resolution which requires proxies that describe the convective storms themselves rather than their respective mesoscale environment.

[18] It is used by the European Severe Storms Laboratory and various other organizations including Deutscher Wetterdienst (DWD) and State Meteorological Agency (AEMET).

Most notably, the 2021 South Moravia tornado received a rating (IF4) and full damage survey on the IF-scale conducted by ESSL, the Czech Hydrometeorological Institute and four other organizations.

[21] On July 27, 2022, ESSL launched a site with experimental forecasts of lightning and hail for Europe based on post-processed weather model data.