Each year in Australia thunderstorms and their associated lightning, hail and precipitation are responsible for hundreds of millions of dollars damage. Thunderstorms have the potential to cause or contribute to the loss of lives. Radar is the primary observation tool used by operational meteorologists to detect these storms. However, radar provides only limited spatial coverage. Other observing systems, such as satellite-based infrared and visible imaging sensors and lightning detection sensors, can be used to detect damaging storms outside of radar coverage.

The Eumetsat Nowcasting Satellite Application Facility's (NWCSAF) Rapidly Developing Thunderstorm (RDT) software application detects cloud objects and classifies these using temporal, spatial and spectral characteristics, providing an estimate of the potential for a cloud object to become a severe/damaging storm. The software also produces an estimate of the future track of each cloud object.

NWCSAF RDT software has been applied to 12-months of observations from the Advanced Himawari Imager. The NWCSAF RDT outputs have been analysed to provide measures of self-consistency with time, track error with time, and compared to radar-based detections of high reflectivity (40 dBZ) to determine the probability of detection and false alarm rates. Results will be presented.