Abstract
The characteristics of convective clouds on infrared brightness temperature (BTIR) and brightness temperature difference (BTD) image were analyzed using successive Infrared and Visible Spin-Scan Radiometer (VISSR) data of FY-2, and an integrated detection method of convective clouds using infrared multi-thresholds in combination with tracking techniques was implemented. In this method, BT and BTD thresholds are used to detect severe convection and uncertain clouds, then the tracking technique including overlap ratio, minimum BT change and cross-correlation coefficient is used to detect convection activities in uncertain clouds. The Application test results show that our integrated detection method can effectively detect convective clouds in different life periods, which show a better performance than any single step in it. The statistical results show that the α-type clouds are mostly large-scale systems, and the β- and γ-type clouds have the highest proportion of general type. However, the proportion of weak convective cloud is higher than that of severe ones in γ-type cloud, and an opposite result is found in the β-type.
Highlights
Convective clouds are produced by atmosphere during uplift movement under thermal or dynamic effect, causing strong winds, hail, lightning, heavy rainfall and other severe weather.Improving the accuracy of convective cloud detection and early warning is an important component of modern weather forecast business construction [1].Since the 1960s, meteorological satellites have rapidly become a powerful tool for studying convective cloud [2,3]
There are mainly three convective cloud detection methods based on the geostationary satellite data
In order to evaluate the performance of BTIR and brightness temperature difference (BTD) images for convection detection, we made a comparison case of BTIR1, BTDIR1–IR2, BTDIR1–IR3, and BTDIR1–IR4 images on 16 June 2015, shown in Figure 1, and tried to determine a feasible threshold range
Summary
Convective clouds are produced by atmosphere during uplift movement under thermal or dynamic effect, causing strong winds, hail, lightning, heavy rainfall and other severe weather. The use of satellite data broadens convective cloud detection methods, and monitors areas where conventional data cannot be obtained [4]. The geostationary satellite, which is able to monitor the same area in successive time, has become one of the main ways to detect convective cloud [5,6]. There are mainly three convective cloud detection methods based on the geostationary satellite data. The research of Huang et al [21] showed that the combined use of the BT threshold method and the image processing method can effectively detect convective cloud in a wide area. We adopted geographic Lat/Lon projection of 5 km × 5 km infrared channels data made from the full disc nominal image file in level-1 data and the research scope was determined to be 70◦ E–140◦ E, 0◦ N–50◦ N
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