Why is the accuracy of severe convective weather forecast low?

Nowadays, many people have installed the weather forecast APP (application software) on their mobile phones, so they can check the forecast at any time. Some people think that the forecast of sudden weather such as strong convection in summer changes quickly: it is still cloudy in the morning, and it suddenly rains at noon, and then the forecast becomes a thunderstorm.

The focus of prediction is "prediction". Can the forecast of severe convective weather be more accurate and advanced? Fan, a senior engineer of the Central Meteorological Observatory, said that the difficulty of severe convective weather forecasting mainly lies in its characteristics of strong suddenness, short life history and strong locality, which leads to the fact that the forecast depends to a great extent on the establishment of a refined spatio-temporal observation network. Take a tornado as an example, its activity space is limited, its diameter is generally less than 1 km, and its life history is generally only a few minutes, and the longest is not more than tens of minutes. In conventional observation nets, it is difficult to catch a small fish in a large net.

Fan pointed out that, for example, thunderstorms in Beijing from afternoon to evening are often due to the continuous accumulation and rise of the east-south airflow in the foothills of the west and north, the temperature drops after the air mass rises, and the water vapor in the clouds condenses and drops, resulting in rainfall. Sometimes this process is more intense, which may form strong convective weather, with thunder, rain and wind everywhere. However, if the environmental conditions for its survival and development no longer exist in the process of moving to the downstream areas, it will soon weaken and dissipate without large-scale impact. For this kind of forecast, it is difficult to make enough advance, and it is not easy to give an early warning half an hour in advance. Often in observation and forecast, small-scale strong convective weather is drawing to a close.