Locating tropical cyclones with integrated SAR and optical satellite imagery

Tropical cyclones (TC) are the most damaging natural hazards for coastal residents because of the associated casualties and property losses. The difficulties of recognizing and locating the eyes of TCs in previous research are because of cloud obstructions in optical images, especially during the formation stage of a TC. The distinct advantage of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) lies in its capability of cloud penetration and hence detection of signal response from sea surface backscatters, which can be used for better detection the eyes of TCs. The aim of this project is to pinpoint the track of a TC by studying the characteristic pattern of its eye, in order to predict its behavior by applying remotely sensed MODIS and ASAR data. This paper uses morphological operators to analyze and extract the region covered by the eye of a TC for the purpose of determining the relative centre of a TC's eye, and then derive the most probable path.