Description (EN): Hail events represent an important natural hazard for Satu Mare county. In both the former two years there were devastating hail events that had hit Satu Mare county and Szabolcs-Szatmár-Bereg county's eatern parts. Crop damage and a large scale of other civil damages occured, causing many farmers to have lost their entire year of invested energy and founds.
Thus mitigating this natural hazard has arisen to become an important issue. The hail suppression is object of national level systems in both Romania and Hungary. The hail suppression systems use technologies that are different, although in essence alike. Every hail suppression method is based on filling the storm clouds with additional condensation nuclei - the method is usually called cloud seeding. That forms a larger number of waterdrops so the same amount of vapour will form more but smaller drops and even if they are frozen due to vertical air moves, if being smaller these frozen drops will get melted until arriving to the land surface, causing much less impact damage. The used material for cloud seeding is silver iodide due to its very adequate structure, similar to that of ice, allowing it to induce condensation inside the clouds, This core idea is used by different technical methods for seeding the clouds: rockets, airplanes, cannons or simply ground-placed generators.
In Romania the national hail suppresion network is based on the idea of setting up rocket launching centers that can "seed" the storm clouds by exploding rockets inside of it. This method has very relevant limitations in the border area, because rockets cannot have cross-border trajectories. At the Romanian-Hungarian border it becomes more important as the dominant trail direction of the storm clouds is West-East. It means that the border area is usually affected by already developed clouds, their seeding in the moment they pass the state border is already useless. Anyway, considering the speed of developing the Romanian hail suppression system so far, it will not create protection for Satu Mare county in the next years.
In Hungary the national hail suppression network is being developed with a set target date to be operable in
2018. It is based on a different technical concept of settling a large number of generators located on the ground (by an approximate 10 kms distance grid density) that are emanating silver iodide particles to the lower atmosphere. The cloud seeding process is taking place naturally, as the convective storm clouds are drawing inside the air from lower layers. The most important element of the system is the meteorologic radar forecast, that can detect by hours before storm cloud formation those situations that may lead to dangerous hail-storms. Activity of the ground generators has to begin immediately and it stops only after forecasting specialists confirm that the hail hazard is over.
Considering the above described phenomena Satu Mare county is in a special cross-border situation that the Hungarian hail suppression system may be more effective to it than the Romanian one, as the western winds bring already seeded, weakened storm clouds to its western borders if the Hungarian system works properly, whilst the Romanian national system's concept would start seeding at the state border already developed, dangerous storm clouds. The idea of the present project is to combine the two systems on the territory of Satu Mare county and to put up a county-level hail suppression system based on the operation of ground generators.
The partners cooperating for this pupose are Satu Mare County Territoial-Administrative Unit (UATSM), that is the name of the county level public administration, as lead partner, and the Hungarian Meteorological Service (OMSZ) based in Budapest, but with legal competences in meteorologic activity on the entire territory of Hungary. The cooperation and the possibe success of the present project is underpinned also by the favourable situation of a meteorological radar station in Napkor, in Szabolcs-Szatmár-Bereg county that offers the best radar forecasting infrastructure for hail suppression activity, as this is the very basis for functioning of this type of ground generator hail suppression systems.
UATSM asked for the consent of the operator of the future Romanian hail suppression system, the Authority for Administration of the National Hail Suppression and Rain Enhancig System. It welcomed the local initiative.
As result a Satu Mare county coverage hail suppression system will be set up, formed by 40 authomatic and energetically autonomous generator stations and a central control unit, that will benefit of the enhanced hail prediction services and alerting by the project partner OMSZ. In order to offer the best available hail forecast service, the OMSZ will develop in the framework of the present project its meteorological observation stations' equipment in the Romanian-Hungarian border area.
Read more Expected Outputs (EN): Project main result is protection against devastating hail events for the territory and population of Satu Mare county (4418 sq kms, 344,000 people).
By assuring this project result the quality of the joint risk management of the cross-border area will be implicitly raised, as the project introduces a risk mitigation unit nonexistent so far. It mainly eliminates one of the hazardous phenomena, one risk type for an entire county surface. 100% protection against hail can not be assured, but experiences show a decrease of crop lost for territories protected with this technology of approximately 74% (http://www.nefela.hu/index.php?fid=4)
As the highest risk level is represented by the most intensive, devastating hail events, and the used technology, the ground-based generators, has its main effect exactly on reducing the intensity of this natural hazard, we may expect to largely eliminate the damages caused by hail in Satu Mare county.
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