Generating severe convective weather products from the Met Office ensemble

Severe convection is well known for the impacts it causes, from aeroplane diversions and airport closures to the destruction of property and threat to life. Forecasts of severe convective weather can help mitigate the impacts of these if they can provide timely and reliable warnings. It is well known that numerical models cannot accurately predict the locations where these storms will strike and instead post processing techniques focus on identifying the areas most prone to the formation of severe convective weather.

This paper looks at existing severe convection predictors such as CAPE and the wet-bulb potential temperature profile and a neighbourhood method for post processing high resolution model data and applies these techniques to the Met Office convection-permitting UK ensemble to produce skilful forecasts of lightning-producing storms when compared with actual lightning observations. Other types of convective weather are also considered.