Severe surface wind gusts produced by thunderstorm outflow represent a serious hazard to society, and have the potential to damage critical infrastructure. Therefore, climatological understanding of severe convective winds could help provide useful knowledge to industries vulnerable to these events. A key knowledge gap for Australia is the lack of a nation-wide assessment of severe convective winds, which may have a different spatio-temporal distribution to other convective hazards (i.e. hail, tornadoes or extreme precipitation).
Here we present a climatological assessment of severe convective wind events in Australia, defined as surface winds greater than 25 ms^-1 which occur in the proximity of a thunderstorm. We use local observations and reports to identify their large-scale atmospheric environment within reanalyses and extrapolate to regions of poor observational coverage. Knowledge of convective wind environments has been informed by the systematic testing of atmospheric variables, as well as from previous studies in North America and Europe. Atmospheric variables and convective wind environments from reanalyses are compared to observational datasets, produced through a combination of data from the World Wide Lightning Location Network, Global Position and Tracking System lightning data, Bureau of Meteorology AWS station wind gusts and reports from the Bureau Severe Thunderstorm Archive. We used two atmospheric reanalyses; the Bureau of Meteorology Atmospheric Regional Reanalysis for Australia (BARRA) and ERA5, with the capacity for this approach to be applied to climate model simulations, to help enable future research on projected changes in extreme winds.