3-D Storm Automatic Identification Based on Mathematical Morphology

The strom identification, tracking, and forecasting method is one of the important nowcasting techniques. Accurate storm identification is a prerequisite for successful storm tracking and forecasting. Storm identification faces two difficulties: one is false merger and the other is failure to isolate adjacent storms within a cluster of storms. The TITAN (Thunderstorm Identification, Tracking, Analysis, and Nowcasting) algorithm is apt to identify adjacent storm cells as one storm because it uses a single reflectivity threshold. The SCIT (Storm Cell Identification and Tracking) algorithm uses seven reflectivity thresholds and therefore is capable of isolating adjacent storm cells, but it discards the results identified by the lower threshold, leading to the loss of the internal structure information of storms. Both TITAN and SCIT have the problem of failing to satisfactorily identify false merger. To overcome these shortcomings, this paper proposes a novel approach based on mathematical morphology. The approach first applies the single threshold identification followed by implementing an erosion process to mitigate the false merger problem. During multi-threshold identification stages, dilation operation is performed against the storm cells which are just obtained by the higher threshold identification, until the storm edges touch each other or touch the edges of the previous storms identified by the lower threshold. The results of experiment show that by combining the strengths of the dilation and erosion operations, this approach is able to mitigate the false merger problem as well as maintain the internal structure of sub-storms when isolating storms within a cluster of storms.