Abstract: Thunderstorm is meso-scale weather with space scale varying from a
few kilometres to a couple of 100 kilometres and time scale varying from less
than an hour to several hours. Severe thunderstorms, however, produce strong
surface wind squalls, lightning, heavy rain showers, occasional hail,
down-bursts and tornadoes leading to loss of life and property on the ground
and aviation hazard aloft. Prediction of severe thunderstorm is a challenging
task for the atmospheric scientists around the globe. The rationale of the
present study is, thus, to view the relative significance of two important
convective energies, convective available potential energy (CAPE) and
convective inhibition energy (CIN) in the genesis of severe thunderstorms
during the pre-monsoon season (April – May) over Kolkata (22°32'N,
88°20'E). The concept of fractal dimension is applied in
this study to observe the degree of selfsimilarity between CAPE and CIN for the
prevalence of severe thunderstorms during the pre-monsoon season. Fractal
dimension of CAPE and CIN is measured with the help of the level of free
convection (LFC). The fractal dimension is considered in this study as the
measure of randomness. The result reveals that CIN has more selfsimilarity than
CAPE for the genesis of severe thunderstorms over Kolkata.
Keywords: CAPE, CIN, severe thunderstorm, genesis, fractal dimension, LFC
