INTELLIGENT LOCATION OF TROPICAL CYCLONE CENTER

The tropical cyclone center location is a very important aspect in weather forecast and typhoon analysis, which is also a difficult issue when done manually. Satellite digital photograph makes it possible to carry out such task by aid of modern digital and computer means of processing. Based on image process technology, it is possible to apply new method according to the feature of digital imaging which was useless in human based center location method. In order to improve the objectivity and precision of the location, a novel intelligent automatic system framework will be proposed, to locate the tropical cyclone center intelligently and automatically, based on the satellite photograph. After pre-processing, several center location technologies will be put forward, based on tropical cyclone's structure, the combining movement of whirl and translation. According to the tropical cyclone's symmetry shape and its spiral movement feature, logarithmic helix is used to fit the edge or skeleton of the cyclone feature cloud, which can be used to estimate the center of the cyclone. According to its movement feature, a rotation matching methodology will be proposed to catch the track through imaging sequence. As an example, the computing methodology produced in this paper was applied in experimental cyclone forecasting by the Shanghai Meteorology Center. The proposed solutions was confirmed to have the potential for successful application to the problem of tropical cyclone center tracking, and the system is effective and the performance errors are acceptable for practical applications.