A Machine Learning Approach to Improve the Usability of Severe Thunderstorm Wind Reports

Abstract

Abstract Many concerns are known to exist with thunderstorm wind reports in the National Center for Environmental Information Storm Events Database, including the overestimation of wind speed, changes in report frequency due to population density, and differences in reporting due to damage tracers. These concerns are especially pronounced with reports that are not associated with a wind speed measurement, but are estimated, which make up almost 90% of the database. We have used machine learning to predict the probability that a severe wind report was caused by severe intensity wind, or wind ≥ 50 kt (∼25 m s−1). A total of six machine learning models were trained on 11 years of measured thunderstorm wind reports, along with meteorological parameters, population density, and elevation. Objective skill metrics such as the area under the ROC curve (AUC), Brier score, and reliability curves suggest that the best performing model is the stacked generalized linear model, which has an AUC around 0.9 and a Brier score around 0.1. The outputs from these models have many potential uses such as forecast verification and quality control for implementation in forecast tools. Our tool was evaluated favorably at the Hazardous Weather Testbed Spring Forecasting Experiments in 2020, 2021, and 2022.