Rapid radar-based rainfall nowcasting

Abstract

In this paper, a new Radar-based technique to forecast probability of rainfall within the next 4 hours is presented. Time series data of Doppler Weather RADARs located at different points in the Philippines allow us to observe and forecast the chance of rain at a more localized level. Trajectories derived from the trail of past observations are used to generate the percent chance of rain (PCOR) for different cities. From this technique, automatically obtained forecasts for rain events are generally accurate with an average accuracy of 94.84%, and with Success Ratio of 45.95% for forecasted rain with actual rain events for the first hour.