Creating Post-Event Storm Tracks for Severe Weather Climatologies

Commonly employed storm tracking algorithms do not use information on the subsequent positions of a storm because it is not available at the time that associations between frames are carried out, but post-event analysis is not similarly constrained. Therefore, it should be possible to obtain better tracks for post-event analysis than what a real-time algorithm is capable of. In this paper, we describe a statistical procedure to determine storm tracks from a set of identified storm cells over time. We find that this procedure results in fewer, longer-lived tracks at all scales.