• Journal of the Korean earth science society
• /
• v.30 no.6
• /
• pp.744-758
• /
• 2009

The characteristics of brightness temperature (BT) of infrared and water vapor channels from MTSAT-1R have been investigated using 12 persistent and frequent lightning cases selected from the summer lightnings of 2006-2008. The infrared (IR1, 10.3-11.3 ${\mu}M$) and water vapor (WV, 6.5-7.0 ${\mu}M$) channels from the MTSAT-1R and the lightning observation data from Korea Meteorological Administration are used. When there is no lightning, the BTs of the IR1 and WV channels show the largest frequency at around 290-295K and 245K, respectively. On the other hand, the BTs of two channels show the largest frequency at 215K caused by strong convection when there is lightning. As a result, the WV-IR1 difference (BTDWI) sharply increases from -50K to 0K. Although it depends on the evolution stage of thunderstorms, the lightning mainly occurs at the core of circular convection in the mesoscale convective complex (MCC), whereas the lightning occurs by concentrated line-shape in the squall line. A strong positive correlation exists between the lightning frequency and the BT in the MCC regardless of the BT, but only at the very cold BT in the squall line. In general, the characteristics of BT are well defined for the lightning occurring in the concentrated line, but they are not well defined in the MCC, especially during the decaying stage of MCC. When they are defined well, the lightning occurs when the BTs of IR1 and WV are lower than 215K, BTDWI is near -3 to 1K, and local standard deviation of IR1 decreases to around 1K.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
• /
• v.31 no.6
• /
• pp.531-548
• /
• 2015

Atmospheric Motion Vector (AMV) from satellite images have shown Slow Speed Bias (SSB) in comparison with rawinsonde. The causes of SSB are originated from tracking, selection, and height assignment error, which is known to be the leading error. However, recent works have shown that height assignment error cannot be fully explained the cause of SSB. This paper attempts a new approach to examine the possibility of SSB reduction of COMS AMV by using a new target tracking algorithm. Tracking error can be caused by averaging of various wind patterns within a target and changing of cloud shape in searching process over time. To overcome this problem, Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) has been adopted to extract the coldest cluster as target since the shape of such target is less subject to transformation. Then, an image filtering scheme is applied to weigh more on the selected coldest pixels than the other, which makes it easy to track the target. When AMV derived from our algorithm with sum of squared distance method and current COMS are compared with rawindsonde, our products show noticeable improvement over COMS products in mean wind speed by an increase of $2.7ms^{-1}$ and SSB reduction by 29%. However, the statistics regarding the bias show negative impact for mid/low level with our algorithm, and the number of vectors are reduced by 40% relative to COMS. Therefore, further study is required to improve accuracy for mid/low level winds and increase the number of AMV vectors.