Automatic Template Matching Method for Tropical Cyclone Eye Fix

Abstract

A time-honored way of finding, or fixing, the center of a tropical cyclone (TC) is to overlay templates of spirals onto a printout of radar or satellite image. Modern methods, however, mostly focus on wind field analysis, or other motion vector techniques. These techniques cannot be applied effectively if the image is sampled infrequently, or when the TC moves fast. In this paper, we present a TC eye fix method that uses automatically generated templates to match spiral rainbands of TCs. Temporal information can be utilized optionally in the method to improve results. The method gives an average error of about 0.16 degrees in latitude/longitude on the Mercator projected map in our test radar image sequences. This is comparable to the relative error of about 0.3 degrees given by different TC warning centers.