Estimation of Tropical Cyclone Intensity Using Infrared Data from a Geostationary Satellite

Abstract

Accurate estimation of tropical cyclone (TC) intensity is of great significance for serious natural disasters. A new method is presented to estimate intensity of TC using satellite infrared data. Firstly, TC region is calculated according to the location of TC center. Secondly, 2D-PCA algorithm is used to extract feature of bright temperature image, and historical data of TC intensity is matched with the k-nearest neighbor algorithm. Thirdly, the matching results are analyzed and the intensity information of TC is estimated. In addition, a TC intensity database, which contains historical data during 2006-2010, is developed for estimation of TC intensity. Experiments show that the proposed method is efficient for real-time estimation of TC intensity, average error of estimation is lower than 15 hPa.