A statistical approach to fast nowcasting of lightning potential fields | CU Experts

Abstract. Thunderstorms and associated hazards like lightning can pose a serious threat to people outside and infrastructure.; Thus, very short-term prediction capabilities (called nowcasting) have been developed to capture this threat and aid in decision-making on when to bring people inside for safety reasons.; The atmospheric research and operational communities have been developing and using nowcasting methods for decades, but most methods do not rely on formal statistical approaches.; A novel and fast statistical approach to nowcasting of lightning threats is presented here that builds upon an integro-difference modeling framework.; Inspiration from the heat equation is used to define a redistribution kernel, and a simple linear advection scheme is shown to work well for the lightning prediction example.; The model takes only seconds to estimate and nowcast and is competitive with a more complex image deformation approach that is computationally infeasible for very short-term nowcasts.;

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