A Satellite-Derived Global Database of Tracked Convective Storms and their Environments for the INCUS Mission

Understanding how convective storms respond to changes in their environment on a local scale is critical to elucidate how Earth’s changing climate will affect storms globally. Quantifying this relationship between the local-scale environment and convective clouds is a key goal of the upcoming NASA INvestigation of Convective UpdraftS (INCUS) mission, which will observe convective mass flux from space. Ahead of the INCUS mission launch we have begun examining convective environments using existing observational databases. There is now a vast amount of storm-scale observational data, including those from geostationary and low-earth orbiting satellites, as well as ground-based observing systems. However, employing these datasets to build comprehensive databases of convective storms and the local environments that support them throughout their lifetimes requires new analysis methodologies. In preparation for the INCUS mission, we have used the Tracking and Object-Based Analysis of Clouds (tobac) cloud object tracking package to identify, track and analyze storms and their environments. Using tobac to track storms with geostationary satellite and ground-based radar data, we have built a comprehensive, months-long database of convective storms over their entire lifetime. For each individual convective storm, the database contains information on their formation environments (including convective available potential energy, wind shear, etc.), the evolution of these environments over time, and, where applicable, additional data, such as those from low earth orbiting satellites. In this presentation, we will discuss this new dataset, the methodology supporting its production, and the tracking sensitivity to time resolution. We will also provide some first results examining how remotely sensed properties such as liquid and ice water paths vary with storm-scale environmental parameters across storm lifetime.