Major Role of Marine Heatwave and Anthropogenic Climate Change on a Giant Hail Event in Spain

Abstract

A severe hailstorm that occurred in Spain on 30 August 2022, caused material and humandamage, including one fatality due to giant hailstones up to 12 cm in diameter. By applying a pseudo‐globalwarming approach, here we evaluate how a simultaneous marine heatwave (and anthropogenic climate change)affected a unique environment conductive to such giant hailstones. The main results show that the supercelldevelopment was influenced by an unprecedented amount of convective available energy, with significantcontributions from thermodynamic factors. Numerical simulations where the marine heatwave is not presentshow a notable reduction in the hail‐favorable environments, related mainly to modifications in thermodynamicenvironment. Our simulations also indicate that the environment in a preindustrial‐like climate would be lessfavorable for convective hazards and thus the hailstorm event would likely not have been as severe as theobserved one, being possible to perform a novel attribution of such kind