Using modern technology to protect vineyards from hail amid climate change

Abstract

Over the past two decades, Georgia has faced increasingly heavy rainfall, hail and flooding, which especially devastated Kakheti wine region in Southern Georgia, causing severe damage to hundreds of vineyards. Since 2015, 85 anti-hail missile systems have been installed to protect entire Kakheti region, however, for the effective use of a modern anti-hail system, it became necessary to timely forecast extreme weather events of a regional and local scale. Thus, this article aims to develop timely forecasting of strong convection, dangerous precipitation and hail using modern weather forecasting models and radar technologies in Georgia. For this reasons various combinations of the physics parameterization schemes of the WRF-ARW model, the ARL READY system and the data of the modern meteorological radar Meteor 735CDP10 are used to predict the thermodynamic state of the atmosphere and assess the possible level of development of convective processes. The analysis of the calculated results showed that the variants of the microphysics parametrization schemes of the WRF model lead to significant variability in precipitation forecasts on complex terrain. Meanwhile, the upper-air diagrams of the READY system clearly showed the instability of the atmosphere for the cases discussed. Some results of these calculations are presented and analysed in this paper.