Tropical Cyclone Research using Large Infrared Image Data Sets

Geostationary satellites have been observing tropical cyclones and providing high spatial and temporal resolution infrared (IR) window images since the 1970s. While that data has been invaluable for tropical cyclone detection and tracking, there have been few quantitative applications of IR imagery for investigations of intensity, structure, and motion, particularly with large data samples. A project to build an archive of IR images of tropical cyclones in a common format on CD-ROM will be described. Through 1999, this archive will contain approximately 25,000 images of 95-100 tropical cyclones. Examples of new derived IR image products, such as motion relative average image animation and cloud asymmetry measurements, will be presented. New research findings using the CD-ROM data set will be shown. Research projects - past, present, and future - that utilize large data sets of tropical cyclone IR imagery will be reviewed. This includes both those that use the IR images alone, along with "Best Track" data, and those that incorporate other data such as aircraft, satellite microwave, satellite winds, and numerical model data sets.