Abstract
Weather monitoring systems, such as Doppler radars, collect a high volume of measurements with fine spatial and temporal resolutions that provide opportunities to study many convective weather events. This study examines the spatial and temporal characteristics of severe thunderstorm life cycles in central United States mainly covering Kansas, Oklahoma, and northern Texas during the warm seasons from 2010 to 2014. Thunderstorms are identified using radar reflectivity and cloud-to-ground lightning data and are tracked using a directed graph model that can represent the whole life cycle of a thunderstorm. Thunderstorms were stored in a GIS database with a number of additional thunderstorm attributes. Spatial and temporal characteristics of the thunderstorms were analyzed, including the yearly total number of thunderstorms, their monthly distribution, durations, initiation time, termination time, movement speed and direction, and the spatial distributions of thunderstorm tracks, initiations, and terminations. Results revealed that thunderstorms were most frequent across the eastern part of the study area, especially at the borders between Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Arkansas. Finally, thunderstorm occurrence is linked to land cover, including a comparison of thunderstorms between urban and surrounding rural areas. Results demonstrated that thunderstorms would favor forests and urban areas. This study demonstrates that advanced GIS representations and analyses for spatiotemporal events provide effective research tools to meteorological studies.
Highlights
Meteorologists have great interest in the climatology of thunderstorms across the world because severe thunderstorms could cause heavy rain, large hail, lightning strikes, and strong winds, which can potentially damage lives and property [1,2]
This study demonstrates that advanced Geographic Information Systems (GISs) representations and analyses for spatiotemporal events provide effective research tools to meteorological studies
The results of the thunderstorm climatology highlight a number of different spatial and temporal characteristics found during the warm seasons from 2010 to 2014
Summary
Meteorologists have great interest in the climatology of thunderstorms across the world because severe thunderstorms could cause heavy rain, large hail, lightning strikes, and strong winds, which can potentially damage lives and property [1,2] Weather monitoring systems, such as the Doppler radar, collect data with increasing spatial and temporal resolutions and provide great opportunities for researchers to study convective weather events [3,4]. Mathon and Laurent [6] provided an eight-year (June–September, 1989–1998) climatology of Sahelian MCS using the METEOSAT infrared images with 0.5-h temporal resolution and 5-km spatial resolution They used both forward and backward areal overlap on consecutive images to construct whole life cycles of MCS.
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