Author(s)

Xinwei Liu¹, Haixia Duan², Wubin Huang^1*, Runxia Guo¹, Bolong Duan¹

¹Lanzhou Central Meteorological Observatory, Lanzhou, China.
²Lanzhou Institute of Drought Meteorology, China Meteorological Administration, Lanzhou, China.

Severe convective weather can lead to a variety of disasters, but they are still difficult to be pre-warned and forecasted in the meteorological operation. This study generates a model based on the light gradient boosting machine (LightGBM) algorithm using C-band radar echo products and ground observations, to identify and classify three major types of severe convective weather (i.e., hail, short-term heavy rain (STHR), convective gust (CG)). The model evaluations show the LightGBM model performs well in the training set (2011-2017) and the testing set (2018) with the overall false identification ratio (FIR) of only 4.9% and 7.0%, respectively. Furthermore, the average probability of detection (POD), critical success index (CSI) and false alarm ratio (FAR) for the three types of severe convective weather in two sample sets are over 85%, 65% and lower than 30%, respectively. The LightGBM model and the storm cell identification and tracking (SCIT) product are then used to forecast the severe convective weather 15 - 60 minutes in advance. The average POD, CSI and FAR for the forecasts of the three types of severe convective weather are 57.4%, 54.7% and 38.4%, respectively, which are significantly higher than those of the manual work. Among the three types of severe convective weather, the STHR has the highest POD and CSI and the lowest FAR, while the skill scores for the hail and CG are similar. Therefore, the LightGBM model constructed in this paper is able to identify, classify and forecast the three major types of severe convective weather automatically with relatively high accuracy, and has a broad application prospect in the future automatic meteorological operation.

Severe Convective Weather, Machine Learning, LightGBM, Early Warning and Forecast

Liu, X. , Duan, H. , Huang, W. , Guo, R. and Duan, B. (2021) Classified Early Warning and Forecast of Severe Convective Weather Based on LightGBM Algorithm. Atmospheric and Climate Sciences, 11, 284-301. doi: 10.4236/acs.2021.112017.