Nowcasting with Artificial Intelligence for African Rainfall: NAIAR

This project aims to use new digital solutions to create 0 to 6 hour predictions - nowcasting - for tropical storms using satellite data. The methods will be developed and rolled-out for Africa, where people urgently need information about storm hazards, through our existing online platforms and smartphone apps. In this way the results of the research will be used to deliver information on storm hazards to users within minutes. The project very closely addresses the NERC Digital Strategy.

Tropical storms are very unpredictable, changing very rapidly - explosively - over timescales of an hour or so. For this reason, predictions are naturally very uncertain. Very often, the most important information people need regarding a storm hazard is what is happening now, and some information about how the storm likely to move and develop in the next couple of hours. This process is called "nowcasting" and in the USA, nowcasting of tornados saves many lives every year. The lack of weather radars in most African countries means that nowcasting is almost completely absent, but we have recently shown that satellite methods can provide useful nowcasting of storms too. The new Meteosat Third Generation (MTG) satellite will provide even better data coverage, from about 2024, at higher frequency and finer spatial scale. There is a tremendous opportunity to innovate in the creation of new nowcasting methods and communicate them to weather services, organisations and the public across Africa.

While existing satellite nowcasting methods have some skill, they also have major shortcomings. They work by extrapolating observed patterns forward in time, but are not constrained to obey the laws of physics, and unphysical predictions commonly occur. The most challenging problem in storm nowcasting is to predict the initiation and subsequent development of new storms in future: there is no accepted way to do this, and our considerable knowledge of the physics of initiation is not...