---
abstract: 'Computers are widely utilized in today’s weather forecasting as a powerful tool to leverage an enormous amount of data. Yet, despite the availability of such data, current techniques often fall short of producing reliable detailed storm forecasts. Each year severe thunderstorms cause significant damage and loss of life, some of which could be avoided if better forecasts were available. We propose a computer algorithm that analyzes satellite images from historical archives to locate visual signatures of severe thunderstorms for short-term predictions. While computers are involved in weather forecasts to solve numerical models based on sensory data, they are less competent in forecasting based on visual patterns from satellite images. In our system, we extract and summarize important visual storm evidence from satellite image sequences in the way that meteorologists interpret the images. In particular, the algorithm extracts and fits local cloud motion from image sequences to model the storm-related cloud patches. Image data from the year 2008 have been adopted to train the model, and historical thunderstorm reports in continental US from 2000 through 2013 have been used as the ground-truth and priors in the modeling process. Experiments demonstrate the usefulness and potential of the algorithm for producing more accurate thunderstorm forecasts.'
author:
- 'Yu Zhang, Stephen Wistar, Jia Li, Michael Steinberg and James Z. Wang [^1]'
bibliography:
- 'ref.bib'
title: Storm Detection by Visual Learning Using Satellite Images
---

Acknowledgments {#acknowledgments .unnumbered}
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Acknowledgment {#acknowledgment .unnumbered}
==============

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1027854. Shared computational infrastructure was provided by the Foundation under Grant No. 0821527. Part of the work was done when J. Z. Wang and J. Li were with the Foundation. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Foundation. We also thank the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) for providing the data used in this research. Siqiong He assisted with data collection. The discussions with Jose A. Piedra-Fernandez of the University of Almeria, Spain, has been very helpful.

[^1]: Manuscript received –; revised –.
