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Unsupervised Clustering of Geostationary Satellite Cloud Properties for Estimating Precipitation Probabilities of Tropical Convective Clouds
- Title
- Unsupervised Clustering of Geostationary Satellite Cloud Properties for Estimating Precipitation Probabilities of Tropical Convective Clouds
- Authors
- Kim D.; Kim H.-J.; Choi Y.-S.
- Ewha Authors
- 최용상
- SCOPUS Author ID
- 최용상
- Issue Date
- 2023
- Journal Title
- Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology
- ISSN
- 1558-8424
- Citation
- Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology vol. 62, no. 8, pp. 1083 - 1094
- Keywords
- Classification; Cloud microphysics; Convective clouds; Deep learning; Precipitation
- Publisher
- American Meteorological Society
- Indexed
- SCIE; SCOPUS
- Document Type
- Article
- Abstract
- Understanding the growth of tropical convective clouds (TCCs) is of vital importance for the early detection of heavy rainfall. This study explores the properties of TCCs that can cause them to develop into clouds with a high probability of precipitation. Remotely sensed cloud properties, such as cloud-top temperature (CTT), cloud optical thickness (COT), and cloud effective radius (CER) as measured by a geostationary satellite are trained by a neural network. First, the image segmentation algorithm identifies TCC objects with different cloud properties. Second, a self-organizing map (SOM) algorithm clusters TCC objects with similar cloud microphysical properties. Third, the precipitation probability (PP) for each cluster of TCCs is calculated based on the proportion of precipitating TCCs among the total number of TCCs. Precipitating TCCs can be distinguished from nonprecipitating TCCs using Integrated Multi-Satellite Retrievals for Global Precipitation Measurement precipitation data. Results show that SOM clusters with a high PP (>70%) satisfy a certain range of cloud properties: CER ≥ 20 μm and CTT < 230 K. PP generally increases with increasing COT, but COT cannot be a clear cloud property to confirm a high PP. For relatively thin clouds (COT < 30), however, CER should be much larger than 20 mm to have a high PP. More importantly, these TCC conditions associated with a PP ≥ 70% are consistent across regions and periods. We expect our results will be useful for satellite nowcasting of tropical precipitation using geostationary satellite cloud properties. © 2023 American Meteorological Society.
- DOI
- 10.1175/JAMC-D-22-0175.1
- Appears in Collections:
- 공과대학 > 기후에너지시스템공학과 > Journal papers
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