Study on upper air sounding data sensitivity towards thunderstorm activities over Kuching and Miri from 2010 to 2015

Noor Azam Shaari

Abstract

Severe thunderstorm and rainfall activities are dangerous to any humankind activities including the airport operations. Thorough studies about the thunderstorm activities at the airports are important for flight safety as scholars have attempted to understand thunderstorm behavior that is measured from atmospheric stability indices. The atmospheric stability indices at Kuching and Miri airports were analyzed to predict the precursor of the phenomenon and to improve the forecasting skills among the forecasters. The result shows that the stability indices suggested by the models were found not to be exclusive to represent the phenomenon that had occurred at some points. The phenomenon might not occur at all, although the index falls within the suggested model’s range. A linear relationship between any two models was analyzed to observe how they interact between them. A strong negative linear relationship between SI -TTI and CAPE-LI was found negative while TPWKI was in a positive correlation coefficient value. The presence of the water content measured by TPW may provide some information about the precursor of the phenomenon at the airports. The index was found to be concentrated at some points during the phenomenon. Thus, TPW may be useful as the third indices to support the relationship between SI-TTI and CAPE-LI as thunderstorm predictions are made at the airports in the future.

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