Development of a real-time hourly wind gust product at 1-km resolution over China

To meet the need for weather forecasting, strong convection monitoring and warning services, a 1 km/h wind gust product across China has been produced using hourly wind gust observations and model forecast data. These data are adopted after the procedure of quality control, space-time matching and fusion analysis. This product is updated at a 5-minute lag with the overall RMSEs of 1.9 m/s for independent test and 0.68 m/s for the non-independent test. The results indicate that as the wind speed increases, the number of samples continuously declines, there is a relatively pronounced tendency for the product's error to rise, and the accuracy gradually decreases. However, the quality of this product improves effectively compared to model predictions of high speed of wind gusts. Specifically, the accuracy of wind speed above magnitude 9 has improved by 89.3% (13.1%—＞24.8%), and the relative error has dropped significantly with a reduction ratio of about 27.4% (−35.8%—＞−26.0%). The development of this product can support disaster mitigation and decision-making related to catastrophic gales and typhoons.