Nowcasting lightning flash rate and peak wind gusts associated with severe thunderstorms using remotely sensed TRMM-LIS data

Abstract The momentous weather hazards during the pre-monsoon season (April–May) over Kolkata (22° 32′ N, 88° 20′ E), India, is mostly due to lightning flashes and surface wind gusts associated with severe thunderstorms. A multi-layer perceptron (MLP) model is developed to forecast the lightning flash rate and peak wind gusts which accompany severe thunderstorms. Meteorological parameters derived from radiosonde weather observations from 1998 to 2009 are taken as input whereas lightning data from the Lightning Imaging Sensor (LIS) and wind gusts from a ground-based observatory are taken as the target output parameters. The skill of the MLP model is compared with the multiple linear regression (MLR) analysis method, and it is observed that the MLP model provides better and more accurate forecasts than the MLR analysis method. The results also reveal that the forecast accuracy is more for surface wind gusts than for the lightning flash rate, both during training and validation of the model. The MLP model forecast is validated with the India Meteorological Department (IMD) weather observations as well as Doppler weather radar and satellite imagery of 2008 and 2009 thunderstorms. Acknowledgements The first author acknowledges the financial assistance granted by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), Govt. of India, for conducting the research and the IMD for providing necessary data. The authors acknowledge the constructive comments and suggestions made by the anonymous reviewers that helped to improve the clarity of this article.