Citation

Novo S. Rev. Bras. Meteorol. 2008; 23(1): 51-57.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2008, Sociedade Brasileira de Meteorologia)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

An automatic method for identifying and tracking convective storms by radar is presented, which is applied to two cases of study chosen as days with reports of severity. The method uses as entry CAPPI images of radar reflectivity 3 km height, consecutive in time, and obtained with the system Vesta ver. 5.3.4.5 (Pozas, 2005). For the identification the connected component labeling is used, and for tracking we seek for the minimum distance to the next position of the storm. For testing the method, the data were divided in three time intervals according to their observed complexity, and the automatic procedure was tested on every separated case. It is demonstrated, in all the cases by simple visual inspection, the ability of the method to identify and track in a right way the storms, being better for the simple case and for that of moderate complexity. Even for the very complex case, the tracking is done with success when the identification threshold is changed. Finally, the limitations of the method are analyzed and some recommendations for the future work proposed.