Severe thunderstorm activity over Bihar on 21~(st) April, 2015: A simulation study by 'Satellite based Nowcasting Technique'

摘要

Satellite based Nowcasting technique is customized version of Forecast and Tracking the Evolution of Cloud Clusters (ForTraCC), it uses the extrapolation technique that allows for the tracking of Mesoscale convective systems (MCS) radiative and morphological properties and forecasts the evolution of these properties (based on cloud-top brightness temperature and area of the cloud cluster) up to 360 minutes, using infrared satellite imagery. The Thermal Infrared (TIR) channel of the weather satellite has been broadly used to study the behaviour of the cloud systems associated with deep convection. The main advantage of this approach is that for most of the globe the best statistics can only be obtained from satellite observations. Such a satellite survey would provide the statistics of MCSs covering the range of meteorological conditions needed to generalize the result and on the other hand only satellite observations can cover the very large range of space and time scale. The algorithm script is taken from Brazilian Scientist Dr. Danial Vila and implemented it into the Indian environment and made compatible with INSAT-3D hdf5 data format. For Indian region it utilizes the INSAT-3D satellite data of TIR1 (10.8 μm) channel and creates nowcast. The output is made compatible with GUI based software MIAS by generating the output in hdf5 format for better understanding and analysis of forecast. The main features of this algorithm are detection of Cloud Cluster based on Cloud Top Brightness Temperature (CTBT) and area i.e. <235 °K and>2400 km~2 respectively. The tracking technique based on MCS overlapping areas in successive images. The script has been automized in Auxiliary Data Processing System (ADPS) and generating the forecast file in every half an hour and convert the output file in geotiff format. The geotiff file is easily converted into KMZ file format using ArcGIS software to overlay it on google map and hosted on the web server.