Detection of rapidly developing convection using rapid scan data from a geostationary satellite

Abstract

Accurate rapidly developing convection (RDC) detection is an essential part of a severe weather warning. A novel algorithm called object track and identification (OTI) is proposed for detecting RDC using infrared image sequences from geostationary meteorology satellite. Convective cells are computed using extended maxima transform-based region growing algorithm. Firstly, a novel area overlap-based object tracking method is proposed to track convective cells in successive images. Secondly, the lowest 25% of overall brightness temperature of the same convective cloud is averaged in order to preserve the extremum information of evolution of cloud. Thirdly, a new identification criterion, which contains three subcriteria, is developed to detect RDC. Contingency table approach applied to various case studies over China shows that the OTI algorithm is efficient and accurate.

Acknowledgement

The authors thank the National Satellite Meteorological Center (NSMC) of China for providing satellite images.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant numbers 61373063, 61373062]; the project of Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of China [grant numbers E0310/1112/02-1].