ISSN 2070-7401 (Print), ISSN 2411-0280 (Online)
Sovremennye problemy distantsionnogo zondirovaniya Zemli iz kosmosa
CURRENT PROBLEMS IN REMOTE SENSING OF THE EARTH FROM SPACE

  

Sovremennye problemy distantsionnogo zondirovaniya Zemli iz kosmosa, 2015, Vol. 12, No. 3, pp. 124-133

The study of two cases of severe tornadoes in the Predural'e region

A.N. Shikhov1 , A.V. Bykov1 
1 Perm State National Research University, Perm, Russia
The article describes the conditions of two cases of strong tornadoes observed June 7, 2009 in the Perm region, and August 29, 2014 in Bashkortostan. The tornado tracks were determined from multi-temporal images of LANDSAT satellites. Using the WRF mesoscale atmospheric model and reanalysis data, the possibility of short-term forecasting of tornado danger in the region was estimated. The model was run with the settings of direct modeling of deep convection with spatial step of 3 km. To estimate the reliability of the modeling results, we used the data of terrestrial, satellite and radar observations on which the comparison was made of the actual and calculated tracks of mesoscale convective systems and their intensities.
In both cases the model WRF reproduces the formation of mesoscale convective systems in areas where tornadoes were observed, but significantly underestimates their intensity. The underestimation of the intensity of convection in the areas of tornadoes formation is probably due to weak daytime air heating in heavy cloudy conditions near the center of the cyclone. As a result, there was an underestimation of convective instability energy. At the same time, the model forecast of convective hazards observed on the cold front 07.06.2009 after an intense day warm-up is characterized by a higher degree of confidence.
Keywords: tornadoes, forest damage, Earth remote sensing data, mesoscale convective storms, the WRF model
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