Identification

Title

Quantifying the Spatial Structure of Tropical Cyclone Imagery

Abstract

Tropical cyclones are highly organized, rotating storms which rank among the most costly natural disasters in the United States. The processes which drive intensification and weakening of such storms are still not fully understood, particularly when these intensity changes occur on short time scales. The physical and environmental factors used in intensity prediction schemes often do not consider the spatial structure of the storm and, taken alone, are inadequate for describing the evolution of storms during rapid intensity change events. Since tropical cyclones generally form far from land-based observing networks, we often rely on satellite observations to assess these storms, particularly infrared observations that reveal cloud top temperatures as a proxy for strength of convection in these storms. In addition, advances in satellite instrumentation has continued to improve the spatial and temporal resolution of these observations. To take advantage of this information, we develop a suite of features which quantify the spatial structure of convection within the storm via infrared brightness temperature data from the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites. These features target the bulk morphology, core structure, and overall organization of the storm to provide a rich, interpretable description of the spatial structure of convection within the storm. This quantification provides a foundation for applying powerful but otherwise hard-to-interpret machine learning techniques to further our understanding of the physical processes behind rapid intensity change in tropical cyclones and support future improvements in forecasting such changes.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

http://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d7vq35sn

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

geoscientificInformation

Keywords

Keyword set

keyword value

Text

originating controlled vocabulary

title

reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

Keyword set

keyword value

EARTH SCIENCE SERVICES > DATA ANALYSIS AND VISUALIZATION > IMAGE PROCESSING

EARTH SCIENCE > ATMOSPHERE > CLOUDS > CONVECTIVE CLOUDS/SYSTEMS (OBSERVED/ANALYZED) > TROPICAL OCEANIC CLOUD SYSTEMS

EARTH SCIENCE > HUMAN DIMENSIONS > NATURAL HAZARDS > TROPICAL CYCLONES

EARTH SCIENCE SERVICES > DATA ANALYSIS AND VISUALIZATION > STATISTICAL APPLICATIONS

originating controlled vocabulary

title

reference date

date type

revision

effective date

2021-09-17

Geographic location

West bounding longitude

East bounding longitude

North bounding latitude

South bounding latitude

Temporal reference

Temporal extent

Begin position

End position

Dataset reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2019-06-14T00:00:00Z

Frequency of update

Quality and validity

Lineage

Conformity

Data format

name of format

version of format

Constraints related to access and use

Constraint set

Use constraints

Copyright Author(s). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Limitations on public access

None

Responsible organisations

Responsible party

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata on metadata

Metadata point of contact

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata date

2023-08-18T18:06:54.804078

Metadata language