Last month’s Rock the South country music festival in Cullman did not get off to a smooth start. Due to the threat of lightning on the opening day of the festival, 35,000 fans were denied entry into the venue.

Part of the accurate forecasting for the severe weather that day was made possible by technology developed at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. The NASA Short-term Prediction Research and Transition Center’s Lightning-Artificial Intelligence (AI) tool also known as SPoRT can predict the probability of the threat of lightning up to 15 minutes before an actual strike occurs. SPoRT was developed through a cooperative agreement between UAH research scientist Dr. Andrew White, NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, and UAH.

“The machine-learning model was trained on a lot of data from previous events to learn the trends and patterns that lead to lightning initiation,” said White. “It then applies what it has learned to make predictions on future events.”

Two meteorologists with the National Weather Service of Huntsville, Huntir Cramer and Dan Dixon, were at Rock the South for operational weather support.

“Summertime pop-up convection can happen very quickly, so having any type of advance warning is extremely helpful, especially with large outdoor events taking place,” Cramer said.

UAH research associate Kelley Murphy and the National Weather Service’s Application Integrations Meteorologist Kris White are members of the engagement training and assessment team and worked with Cramer and Dixon to gather feedback on the program’s performance.

“We can use feedback from Huntir and Dan to tailor the product to their operational needs,” said Murphy. “We value their input and want to make sure that products like Lightning-AI are easy to use and help them with their forecasting and decision support tasks.”

As of now, NASA SPoRT Lightning-AI is only active near NASA centers in support of NASA emergency managers.

Austen Shipley is a staff writer for Yellowhammer News.