Speaker
Description
4.6 million properties in England are at risk of surface water flooding according to recent analysis from the Environment Agency in England. The Met Office is seeking to improve its warnings for short duration, high intensity rainfall to help the public better prepare for and respond to such severe weather. Whilst the possibility of extreme rainfall somewhere in the UK is often predicted several hours or more ahead, it is often not with sufficient confidence in the location of the most intense rainfall to escalate a warning. Current Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) provides skilful forecasts out to several days ahead, but this comes at the expense of its skill at very short lead times.
To address these shortcomings, the Met Office are developing a nowcasting system named PLUVIA to support Operational Meteorologists in issuing warnings and guidance for severe weather, in particular that associated with deep moist convection (DMC). PLUVIA provides a near-surface analysis (Mesoanalysis) using crowd-sourced observations, which draws more closely to observations than the analysis from NWP, to better support the situational awareness of Operational Meteorologists. The PLUVIA Cell Tracker uses 3D radar observations to monitor and forecast the trajectory of the rainfall cores associated with DMC.
This presentation will describe PLUVIA and how it is used by Operational Meteorologists and Hydrometeorologists at the Met Office and Flood Forecasting Centre to issue National Severe Weather Warnings and Rapid Flood Guidance.
