The tornado probability algorithm: A probabilistic machine learning tornadic circulation detection algorithm

The tornado probability algorithm (TORP) uses a random forest machine learning technique to estimate a probability of tornado occurrence based on single-radar data, and is trained on 166 145 data points derived from 0.58-tilt radar data and storm reports from 2011 to 2016, of which 10.4% are tornadic.

A variety of performance evaluation metrics show a generally good model performance for discriminating between tornadic and nontornadic points. When using a 50% probability threshold to decide whether the model is predicting a tornado or not, the probability of detection and false alarm ratio are 57% and 50%, respectively, showing high skill by several metrics and vastly outperforming the TDA. The model weaknesses include false alarms associated with poor-quality radial velocity data and greatly reduced performance when used in the western United States.