Verification of Earth Network's Dangerous Thunderstorm Alerts and NWS Warnings

Earth Networks Incorporated (ENI) has expressed the potential for their Dangerous Thunderstorm Alerts (DTAs) to increase lead-time by an additional nine minutes over current National Weather Service (NWS) severe and tornado warnings while maintaining a similar Probability of detection (POD) and False alarm ratio (FAR). These automated, storm-based alerts combine lightning-based storm tracking with total lightning flash rate thresholds to designate regions with an increased potential for severe and hazardous weather. ENI produces alerts at three different levels: (1) basic thunderstorm, (2) significant thunderstorm, and (3) dangerous thunderstorm. Verification statistics (including POD, FAR and lead time) for all three levels of DTAs and NWS severe thunderstorm and tornado warnings are calculated for a year of data, March 2013 through Feb 2014, using StormData. The goal of this comparison is to reveal how well DTAs perform relative to NWS warnings and if use within operational meteorology is plausible.