Trends in severe thunderstorms and the associated phenomena of tornadoes, hail, and damagingwinds have been difficult to determine because of themany uncertainties in the historical eyewitness-report-based record. The authors demonstrate how a synthetic record that is based on high-resolution numerical modeling may be immune to these uncertainties. Specifically, a synthetic record is produced t...

We discuss the possibilities of use of the new generation of desktops for solution of one of the most important problems of weather forecasting: realtime prediction of thunderstorms, hails and rain storms. The phenomena are associated with development of intensive convection and are considered as the most dangerous weather conditions. The most perspective way of the phenomena forecast is comput...

Weather monitoring systems, such as Doppler radars, collect a high volume of measurements with fine spatial and temporal resolutions that provide opportunities to study many convective weather events. This study examines the spatial and temporal characteristics of severe thunderstorm life cycles in central United States mainly covering Kansas, Oklahoma, and northern Texas during the warm season...

The National Severe Storms Laboratory's (NSSL) Mesocyclone Detection Algorithm (MDA) is designed to search for patterns in Doppler velocity radar data which are associated with rotating updrafts in severe thunderstorms. These storm-scale circulations are typically precursors to tornados and severe weather in thunderstorms, yet not all circulations produce such phenomena. A neural network has be...

As such, the moisture budget of individual thunderstorms is of interest. Observational studies (Braham 1952; Foote and Fankhauser 1973; Fankhauser 1988; Heymsfield and Miller 1988) have great uncertainty associated with them because of the difficulties of measuring, or even estimating relatively accurately, both the input of water vapor and the output rainfall of a storm. Numerical modeling (We...

Multiple Doppler radar analysis has been widely used to retrieve three-dimensional wind fields within thunderstorms and meso-scale convective systems (MCS) since the late 1960s. A number of countries have constructed dense operational radar networks, such as the Operational Programme for the Exchange of Weather Radar Information (OPERA; Köck et al., 2000), to monitor and forecast severe weather...

Thunderstorms are spectacular but hazardous weather phenomena which, together with tropical cyclones and bushfires, top the list of concerns in the Bureau of Meteorology’s Severe Weather Warning Services Program. Insurance-related claims arising from thunderstorms (wind, hail and flash flood damage) from 1967 to 1999 amount to about $A5 billion (Insurance Council of Australia 2000). The Sydney ...