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Early warnings of hazardous thunderstorms over Lake Victoria

Abstract:

Weather extremes have harmful impacts on communities around Lake Victoria in East Africa. Every year, intense nighttime thunderstorms cause numerous boating accidents on the lake, resulting in thousands of deaths among fishermen. Operational storm warning systems are therefore crucial. Here we complement ongoing early warning efforts based on numerical weather pbkp_rediction, by presenting a new satellite data-driven storm pbkp_rediction system, the prototype Lake Victoria Intense storm Early Warning System (VIEWS). VIEWS derives pbkp_redictability from the correlation between afternoon land storm activity and nighttime storm intensity on Lake Victoria, and relies on logistic regression techniques to forecast extreme thunderstorms from satellite observations. Evaluation of the statistical model reveals that pbkp_redictive power is high and independent of the type of input dataset. We then optimise the configuration and show that false alarms also contain valuable information. Our results suggest that regression-based models that are motivated through process understanding have the potential to reduce the vulnerability of local fishing communities around Lake Victoria. The experimental pbkp_rediction system is publicly available under the MIT licence at http://github.com/wthiery/VIEWS.