CHASING thunderstorms just got easier. A new system for predicting their path will soon be in use in Australia, after bettering existing methods of forecasting.
The technique, called THESPA, was developed by at the Centre for Australian Weather and Climate Research and it can produce 鈥渘owcasts鈥� for up to 1 hour ahead. It borrows an idea that is used to predict the movements of cyclones, which are far bigger. THESPA assigns a strike probability 鈥� the chance of a thunderstorm hitting a location in a given time period.
Existing methods merely predict a 鈥渢hreat area鈥� in which a storm is likely to appear. THESPA can detect individual storms and predict their paths, so locations within the threatened area get different probabilities. 鈥淥ur system is more geographically specific,鈥� says Dance.
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The system was fine-tuned using records of thunderstorms near Sydney and tested against a database of 2394 storms that were tracked in China during 51 days surrounding last year鈥檚 Beijing Olympics (Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology, ).