Development and Analysis of COMS AMV Target Tracking Algorithm using Gaussian Cluster Analysis

Atmospheric Motion Vector (AMV) from satellite images have shown Slow Speed Bias (SSB) in comparison with rawinsonde. The causes of SSB are originated from tracking, selection, and height assignment error, which is known to be the leading error. However, recent works have shown that height assignment error cannot be fully explained the cause of SSB. This paper attempts a new approach to examine the possibility of SSB reduction of COMS AMV by using a new target tracking algorithm. Tracking error can be caused by averaging of various wind patterns within a target and changing of cloud shape in searching process over time. To overcome this problem, Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) has been adopted to extract the coldest cluster as target since the shape of such target is less subject to transformation. Then, an image filtering scheme is applied to weigh more on the selected coldest pixels than the other, which makes it easy to track the target. When AMV derived from our algorithm with sum of squared distance method and current COMS are compared with rawindsonde, our products show noticeable improvement over COMS products in mean wind speed by an increase of and SSB reduction by 29%. However, the statistics regarding the bias show negative impact for mid/low level with our algorithm, and the number of vectors are reduced by 40% relative to COMS. Therefore, further study is required to improve accuracy for mid/low level winds and increase the number of AMV vectors.