An Object-Oriented Approach to Nowcasting Showers

Abstract

The use of a simple conceptual model depicting the life cycle of a convective cell, including the production of daughter cells, has been examined as a way of improving nowcasts in certain showery situations. The evolution of the cell from birth through to dissipation is represented as a sequence of six stages, with the cell being described throughout by a fixed set of attributes whose values change as the cell evolves. Cells are identified and their attribute values set automatically from radar and satellite observations, whereupon the conceptual model is used to predict their subsequent evolution. Application of the technique in real cases suggests that it may improve nowcasts in those cases when daughter-cell production has a significant impact on storm development and movement. This ?proof of concept? study has highlighted a number of areas for further work; these include allowing the life cycle to adapt to the convective environment, the use of higher-resolution observations, and investigating means of automatically recognizing appropriate convective situations. Adequate representation of the conceptual model in software is central to this work. Object-oriented programming techniques have proved admirably suited to the task and show promise for other meteorological applications in which it is useful to describe phenomena as individual named entities.