Abstract
Abstract. Tropical thunderstorms cause significant damage to property and lives, and a strong research interest exists in the advances and improvement of thunderstorm predictability by satellite observations. Using high-resolution (2 km and 10 min) imagery from the geostationary satellite, Himawari-8, recently launched over Southeast Asia, we examined the earliest possible time for the prediction of thunderstorms as compared to the potential of low-resolution (4 km and 30 min) imagery of the former satellite. We compared the lead times of high- and low-resolution imageries of 60 tropical thunderstorms that occurred in August 2017. These thunderstorms were identified by the decreasing trend in the 10.45 µm brightness temperature (BT11) by over 5 K per 10 min for the high-resolution imagery and 15 K per 30 min for the low-resolution imagery. The lead time was then calculated over the time from the initial state to the mature state of the thunderstorm, based on the time series of a minimum BT11 of thunderstorm pixels. The lead time was found to be 90–180 min for the high-resolution imagery, whereas it was only 60 min (if detectable) for the low-resolution imagery. These results indicate that high-resolution imagery is essential for substantial disaster mitigation owing to its ability to raise an alarm more than 2 h ahead of the mature state of a tropical thunderstorm.
Highlights
Climate change adaptation and disaster risk management integration have become increasingly important issues since unpredictable natural hazards have started to appear more frequently and intensively in the recent warmer climate (Shaw et al, 2010)
The lead time of 60 cloud samples determined by the low-resolution imagery was not sufficiently accurately measured to monitor the whole development process of tropical thunderstorms
The higher spatial and temporal resolution of satellite observations can be valuable as it would allow for an alarm to be raised for tropical thunderstorms over Southeast Asia approximately 2 h earlier than the low-resolution one based on validation using 60 thunderstorm events
Summary
Climate change adaptation and disaster risk management integration have become increasingly important issues since unpredictable natural hazards have started to appear more frequently and intensively in the recent warmer climate (Shaw et al, 2010). A lead time of zero indicates that the low-resolution imagery failed to detect the cloud pixel, while the cloud observed with the highresolution imagery reached the mature state. This can cause difficulty in detecting the initial state using low-resolution imagery because of the BT11 variation, which is proportional to the observation time interval. The highresolution imagery can accurately monitor the change of the BT11 and be advantageous in the detection of early clouds
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