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Production of globally uniform ISCCP Convection Tracking (CT) dataset and preliminary analysis results
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  • Cindy Wang,
  • Zhengzhao Luo,
  • William Rossow,
  • Cindy Pearl
Cindy Wang
City College of New York

Corresponding Author:[email protected]

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Zhengzhao Luo
CUNY City College of New York
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William Rossow
NOAA CREST-CCNY
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Cindy Pearl
NOAA CREST
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Abstract

The International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project (ISCCP)’s Convection Tracking (CT) database was designed to track the evolution of deep convective cloud systems throughout their life cycle. The database is produced in 3 steps. The first step determines whether a particular image pixel is cloudy and determines the cloud top temperature and optical thickness. The second step clusters up all adjacent cold IR pixels with brightness temperature (TBIR)< 245 K and stores the summary information about cloud structural and radiative properties. Such clusters are referred to as Convective Systems (CSs). A further test identifies Convective Clusters (CCs) as adjacent cloud pixels with TBIR < 220 K. The third step tracks each individual CS over time to form families and produces the CT database. Previous version of the CT data covered the period from 1983-2008 and treated one geostationary satellite at a time. Recently, we started producing a new version of CT data that are built upon the new, H-version ISCCP data (HXG). Improvements from this new CT data include: 1) globally uniform coverage, 2) higher spatial sampling/resolution (from 30 km down to 10 km), and 3) longer data record (1983-2015). This presentation will introduce the new ISCCP CT database and show some preliminary results including comparison with the old CT data and some essential global statistics of deep convective cloud systems.