Substantiation of source data on the parametric algorithms for the classification of weather hazards

Abstract

The meteorological situation is one of the decisive factors determining the safety and frequency of civil aviation flights. Weather hazards (WH), associated with cumulonimbus clouds, such as a heavy shower, thunderstorm, hail, combined with high atmosphere turbulence, quite often lead to aviation events and even accidents. Currently, a domestic weather radar system of the near airfield zone (WR) “Monocle” has been developed and successfully operated. The criteria for the classification of meteorological phenomena (MP), used in the WR, have been developed individually for each phenomenon and have some heuristic character. These criteria are cumbersome and complicate the process of automating the WH classification. In this case, there is a natural desire to generalize the criteria and optimize them in accordance with the theory of distinguishing statistical hypotheses. This article discusses the application of the Bayesian approach to the WH classification. The statistical Bayesian decision theory assumes decision-making in terms of the probability theory when all significant probabilistic values, so-called sufficient statistics, are known. In order to obtain statistical descriptions of the probability distributions of reflectivity and the eddy dissipation rate (EDR), an analysis of radar signals, reflected from such MP as a rain shower, thunderstorm, hail was carried out. The article provides brief descriptions of the methods of conducting experiments to form statistical database and its analysis. Based on the above methods, the statistical parameter H(EDRmax) analysis for a rain shower, the amplitude distribution of reflectivity parameters and the EDR (Zmax, EDRmax) for thunderstorms and hail was carried out, which showed the low distinguishing ability of each individual parameter when solving the problem to classify MP within the assigned alphabet. The obvious solution is dictated by the theory of recognition. To increase the classification confidence, it is essential to share information parameters, for example, in the form of multidimensional distribution densities of the probabilities of random parameters. The article presents a parametric description of the MP “rain shower-thunderstorm-hail” classification features. An analysis to evaluate the probabilistic characteristics of the WH classification for the adopted empirical classification criteria in the WR shows that the adopted criteria are far from optimal in terms of the probabilities of the correct classification, especially in the rain shower case. It is obvious that a problem solution of the assigned classification confidence is associated with the optimization of the feature space and classification criteria. Based on the data obtained, it is necessary to build an algorithm to classify the WH “rain shower-thunderstorm-hail”.

Keywords

• weather radar
• near-airfield zone
• weather hazards
• weather phenomena classification
• statistical data analysis