TRACKING MOTIONS FROM SATELLITE WATER VAPOR IMAGERY: QUANTITATIVE APPLICATIONS TO HURRICANE TRACK FORECASTING

Abstract from the 20th AMS Conf. on Hurricanes and Tropical Meteorology, San Antonio, TX, May 1993, pp.193-196. TRACKING MOTIONS FROM SATELLITE WATER VAPOR IMAGERY: QUANTITATIVE APPLICATIONS TO HURRICANE TRACK FORECASTING ***p ~$4 /v/;'GB f Christopher Velden and Steve Nieman ,,,N -q?- rL Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies ,PL~P?~?/NJ 1 c 3 I Madison, Wisconsin 693 0 Sim Aberson and James Franklin NOAA/AOML, Hurricane Research Division Miami, Florida 1. INTRODUCTION -- - Water vapor imagery from GOES satellites has been available for over a decade. These data are used extensively, mainly in a qualitative mode, by forecasters in the United States (Weldon and Holmes 1991). Some attempts have been made at quantifying the data by tracking features in time sequences of the imagery (Stewart et al. 1985; Hayden and Stewart 1987). For a variety of reasons, applications of this approach have produced marginal results (Velden 1990). Recently, METEOSAT-3 (M-3) was repositioned