Tropical Cyclone Center Positioning Using Single Channel Microwave Satellite Observations of Brightness Temperature

Abstract

Satellite observations of brightness temperature from the Advanced Technology Microwave Sounder (ATMS) and Microwave Humidity Sounder (MHS) humidity sounding channels can provide relatively high horizontal resolution information about cloud and atmospheric moisture in the troposphere, thus revealing the structures of tropical cyclones (TCs). There is usually a high brightness temperature in a TC eye region and low brightness temperature reflecting spiral rain bands. An azimuthal spectral analysis method is used as a center-fixing algorithm to determine the TC center objectively using the brightness temperature observations of the ATMS humidity-sounding channel 18 (183.31 ± 7.0 GHz) and MHS humidity-sounding channel 5 (190.31 GHz). The position in the brightness temperature field encompassing a TC that achieves the largest symmetric component is regarded as the TC center. Two Atlantic hurricanes in 2012, Hurricanes Sandy and Isaac, are first used to analyze the performance of the TC center-fixing technique. Compared with the National Hurricane Center best track, the root-mean-square differences of the center fixing results for Hurricanes Sandy and Isaac are less than 47.3 and 34.3 km, respectively. It is found that the uncertainty of the TC center-fixing algorithm and thus the difference from the best track increases when the brightness temperature distribution within a TC is significantly asymmetric. Then, the TC center-fixing technique is validated for all tropical storms and hurricanes over Northern Atlantic and Western Pacific in 2019. Compared with the best track data, the root-mean-square differences for tropical storms and hurricanes are 33.81 and 26.20 km, respectively. The demonstrated successful performance of the proposed TC center-fixing algorithm to use the single channel of microwave humidity sounders for TC positioning is important for vortex initialization in operational hurricane forecasts.