Wind gust warning verification

Abstract. Operational meteorological centres around the world increasingly include warnings as one of their regular forecast products. Warnings are issued to warn the public about extreme weather situations that might occur leading to damages and losses. In forecasting these extreme events, meteorological centres help their potential users in preventing the damage or losses they might suffer. However, verifying these warnings requires specific methods. This is due not only to the fact that they happen rarely, but also because a new temporal dimension is added when defining a warning, namely the time window of the forecasted event. This paper analyses the issues that might appear when dealing with warning verification. It also proposes some new verification approaches that can be applied to wind warnings. These new techniques are later applied to a real life example, the verification of wind gust warnings at the German Meteorological Centre ("Deutscher Wetterdienst"). Finally, the results obtained from the latter are discussed.