Study of Severe Thunderstorm Event on 30-31 May 2014

Abstract

High Impact Severe weather like thunderstorms are associated with strong winds, dust, thunder, lighting, heavy rainfall, hail. It occursin India during Pre-monsoon season. It has devastating consequences particularly as aviation hazards, loss of life and damage to property, vegetable crops and food. This paper focuses on the study of severe thunderstorms which continued and their presence was felt for two days, starting from Northwest India (Himachal Pradesh, Punjab, Haryana, Delhi and Uttar Pradesh) on 30th May 2014 and moved towards East India (Bihar, Odisha, Gengatic West Bengal) on 31st May 2014 and got dissipated over Kolkata. Weather Research and Forecasting model version 3.6.1 has been used for simulation and investigation of these cases. Sensitivity experiments have been conducted to study the performance of higher grid resolutions (9km, 3km and 1km) domains. The simulated results using WRF-ARW V-3.6.1 model have been used to describe in details the wind flow characteristics of the events at higher resolution domain. Also, simulated geo-potential, CAPE, reflectivity and rainfall have been discussed in details.The model results are being compared with Doppler Weather Radar (DWR) and INSAT 3-D data. The experimental results are presented and discussed in the paper.