Matthew's Journal

For work, I've been thinking about ways to easily track the movement of convective cells in radar data. It's easy to define the existence of a convective cell as any area with a reflectivity greater than a certain threshold. If you stack successive radar scans on top of each other you can used what's called connected component labeling to track how convective cells move across a radar domain so long as some part of the cell occupies the same area from one scan to the next. Thus, you can keep track of what happens to a cell as it moves, splits, merges, dies out, etc...

Below is a visualization where I show three radar scans from a collection of scans. Also displayed is a 35 dBZ isosurface that shows how convective cells move and change between the scans displayed. This isn't a methodology and toolkit that I've perfected for research use yet, but the image below represents a good proof-of-concept.