Quantifying the Links Between Convection and Environment through Cloud Tracking (Invited Presentation)

Understanding how convective storms respond to changes in their local environment is critical to elucidate how Earth’s changing climate will affect storms globally. Cloud tracking has emerged as a valuable tool to quantify this relationship through Lagrangian analysis of clouds. Modern cloud tracking tools such as the Tracking and Object-Based Analysis of Clouds library (tobac) can expand this Lagrangian analysis to massive observational and modeling datasets, enabling quantification of the convection-environment relationship across many clouds. Thanks to the vast amount of observational data of storms at high resolution, including those from geostationary satellites, low-earth orbiting satellites, and ground-based radar networks, we are approaching a global, near-real-time database of clouds, their properties, and the environments that produced them in both observations and high-resolution numerical models. While these databases present a significant opportunity for our field to substantially enhance our understanding of convection, they are also a considerable challenge in data fusion and accurate individual cloud identification. In this presentation, we will discuss cloud and environment tracking across scales with tobac, including new multivariate methodologies, how these are linked to convective environments, and challenges and opportunities for the cloud tracking community as we enter the next era of cloud tracking.