The Thunderstorm Interactive Forecast System: Turning Automated Thunderstorm Tracks into Severe Weather Warnings

Abstract

The Australian Bureau of Meteorology has developed a new tool called the Thunderstorm Interactive Forecast System (TIFS; formerly known as ThunderBox) for interactively producing finished severe weather warnings and other forecasts from thunderstorm tracks, automatically diagnosed from radar data. TIFS is designed to apply recent advances in radar-based thunderstorm cell detection and tracking techniques to the efficient production of operational forecasts and warnings. The system ingests automated thunderstorm cell detections and tracks, allows graphical editing by forecasters, and produces graphical and text products from the edited data. The text generator uses a shallow, domain-specific approach. The graphical products include a map of areas that have been affected by storms, and are forecast to be affected by storms, as well as meteograms for selected locations.