A Technique On Tropical Cyclone Location In Meteorological Remote Sensed Image

Tropical cyclone(TC) center location or eye fix is the first and inevitable procedure in TC forecasting, but mostly done manually in practice. Here a novel and objective method is presented to locate TC center by compensating conventional pattern matching and vector field analysis methods together. First, the skeleton of TC is modeled as logarithmic spiral whose tangent vector field usually constructed at first which is commonly done through a sequence of images with higher temporal resolution. Alternatively, gradient field with respect to the spiral ridge of cloud mountain is extracted and filtered in a single polar-orbiting satellite infrared image instead of consecutive images. Since the wanted vector field describing the tangent direction of spiral is perpendicular to the gradient field we got, without rotating gradients at once, every gradient is expanded directly to a sector to vote for the center of TC.Afterwards candidate center points are verified by the equiangular feature of log spiral and circle. The experimental results show satisfactory results in comparison with the best track data from the China Meteorological Administration especially when the spiral patterns of TC are well structured. Our method being introduced, TC forecasters can fix TC eye objectively and easily from infrared image data of all kinds of meteorological satellites.