Automatic short term thunderstorm occurrence and type prediction at the regional scale

A practice of operational prediction of thunderstorm occurrence and type employed at the Laboratory for Meteorology, Climatology and Environmental Modelling (Florence, Italy) is proposed, which employs atmospheric fields forecast by a limited area model as predictors, lightnings observations in the role of thunderstorm signature. Lightnings are measured today in a relatively easy way, high accuracy is reached and several interesting connections between lightnings features (density, frequency, polarity, etc) and atmospheric processes have been elucidated in recent researches. The limited area atmospheric model short-term predictions are processed to derive relevant atmospheric fields (energy, humidity, etc) used as "ingredients" to predict the probability of occurrence of thunderstorms and the features of the associated phenomenology. Particular care is devoted to the distinction between classes of severe events, such as the occurrence of supercells and the occurrence of mesoscale convective systems.