We discuss our implementation of a near real-time satellite data based severe storm warning system built for the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP), the methods used to diagnose convective developments, and we will show on a number of examples how well such a satellite based system can work, despite the system inherent time lag. We conclude by discussing future developments and improvements that can be made to the system for deployment with extremely large projects such as the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) currently being planned and built in South Africa and Australia that will require monitoring of an area orders of magnitude larger even than we are monitoring today. Using data products derived from the Advanced Himawari Imager (AHI) deployed on the Japanese Meteorological Agency’s (JMA) Himawari 8 satellite, we can obtain information on convective developments in the troposphere that are likely to result in dangerous wind gusts. This data is taken in 10 minute intervals and generally available no later than 8 minutes after the observation time, thus providing near real-time information on the weather situation. One additional challenge is the large area covered by the radio interferometers we are operating. In the case of the Australian Square Kilometre Pathfinder (ASKAP) telescope in remote West Australia’s Murchison Radio Observatory (MRO), the landmass covers dozens of square kilometers featuring 36 dish antennas of 12m diameter each. |
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