In this master’s thesis, I developed a method for detecting intense thunderstorms in the area of Slovenia. The method detects intense convective cells based on meteorological radar measurements and lightning discharges. The pysteps routine was used, which searches for closed areas above a certain threshold of radar reflectivity in the radar reflectivity field, and then determines convective cells from the closed areas using additional criteria. The optimization and verification of the results were carried out for the convective seasons from May to September in the years from 2020 to 2022. The results of this method were optimized and verified on the hail measurements of the precipitation and climatological stations of the Slovenian Environment Agency (ARSO) and on the intervention data of the Administration for Civil Protection and Disaster Relief (URSZR), where the events of hail, severe winds and floods of stormwater were jointly analyzed. In the case of data on interventions, optimization and verification were performed only in selected 13 areas where a sufficient number of reported events occurred. From the results, the verification indices POD (Probability of detection), FAR (False alarm rate), CSI (Critical success index) and BIAS were calculated, which are based on a contingency table. Using these indices, the performance of the method was then evaluated and the optimal parameters were determined. When verifying the method on hail measurements at meteorological stations with optimal parameters, the verification indices reached the value POD = 0.39, FAR = 0.82, CSI = 0.14 and BIAS = 2.20, and when verifying data on interventions related to hail, severe winds and stormwater floods, the verification indices amounted to POD = 0.29, FAR = 0.61, CSI = 0.20 and BIAS = 0.73. A few stormy days for which ARSO issued a storm report were also analyzed separately. For these days, the CSI verification index was between 0.10 and 0.33 for the verification of hail at meteorological stations, while the index reached values between 0.25 and 0.80 when verifying data on hail, severe winds and stormwater floods interventions. The developed method generally performs well in the detection of intense thunderstorms, and the verification results are comparable to the results of other studies performed in Slovenia or abroad.
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