Patent ID: 7069258

Claim:
A method of predicting the occurrence of a selected weather event, the method comprising the steps of: identifying a first set of parameters that relate to the selected weather event, wherein the parameters in the first set are statistically correlated; identifying a data set comprised of a plurality of observations for the weather event over a selected geographical area, each observation containing values for the parameters; performing a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to identify and select a reduced set of principal components corresponding to a second set of parameters, the reduced set of principal components being uncorrelated, the second set of parameters being a subset of the first set of parameters, the parameters in the second set of parameters contributing at least a majority of the variance of the first set of parameters; rotating the reduced set of principal components to provide a third set of parameters, wherein each parameter corresponds to a physical data measurement; and performing a logistic regression on the third set of parameters to determine the predictive equation for forecasting of the selected weather event.