GIS and Remote Sensing in Hydrology, Water Resources and Environment (Proceedings of ICGRHWE held at the Three Gorges Dam, China, September 2003). IAHS Publ. 289, 2004, 401-409

1 China University of Mining & Technology-Beijing, Beijing 100083, China

2 Joint Laboratory for Geoinformation Science, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China

3 The P.L.A.91561 Command, Guang Zhou 510320, China

4 National Satellite Meteorological Center, China Meteorological Administration, Beijing 100081, China

Abstract The activities and evolution of Mesoscale convective systems (MCSs) is one of the primary causes of heavy rainstorms. More and more scholars are interested in the study of MCSs in recent years. However, the study of MCSs is restricted by the technology of automatic identification and tracking in computers. This paper introduces an improved method of area-overlap which can automatically track MCSs. Using this method, lots of experiments for tracking MCSs were performed using satellite infrared remote sensing data over the Tibetan Plateau and its surrounding area in the summer of 1998. The experimental results show that the precision of tracking MCSs is about 80% with the new method. It increases precision by 10% compared with the original method.

Key words area-overlapped method; Mesoscale Convective Systems (MCSs); tracking model