Development of an object oriented thunderstorm nowcasting system for Barcelona airport

The goal of this master thesis is to develop a thunderstorm information system for Barcelona airport. The purpose of the system is to provide information about all the thunderstorms that are near the airport area or approach it, including its location, horizontal extension, velocity and intensity. The system will generate alarms for the thunderstorms that are forecasted to enter the airport area. The alarm system is based on radar observation of the Catalonian radar network. Thunderstorms are defined as regions with reflectivity exceeding a threshold, and short–term forecasts are done applying a nowcasting algorithm based on extrapolation of the observations. The thunderstorm oriented alarm system developed within this master thesis has been applied to several case studies and the forecasting skill of the system has been evaluated against observations, providing reliability in time up to 30 minutes