Journal
ATMOSPHERE
Volume 8, Issue 3, Pages -Publisher
MDPI
DOI: 10.3390/atmos8030048
Keywords
rainfall; nowcast; motion tracking; optical flow
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Hong Kong Observatory has been operating an in-house developed rainfall nowcasting system called Short-range Warning of Intense Rainstorms in Localized Systems (SWIRLS) to support rainstorm warning and rainfall nowcasting services. A crucial step in rainfall nowcasting is the tracking of radar echoes to generate motion fields for extrapolation of rainfall areas in the following few hours. SWIRLS adopted a correlation-based method in its first operational version in 1999, which was subsequently replaced by optical flow algorithm in 2010 and further enhanced in 2013. The latest optical flow algorithm employs a transformation function to enhance a selected range of reflectivity for feature tracking. It also adopts variational optical flow computation that takes advantage of the Horn-Schunck approach and the Lucas-Kanade method. This paper details the three radar echo tracking algorithms, examines their performances in several significant rainstorm cases and summaries verification results of multi-year performances. The limitations of the current approach are discussed. Developments underway along with future research areas are also presented.
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