Determining requisite revisit time for storm tracking

The ability to correctly perform associations of identified storms across time is important for compiling accurate storm histories and performing short-term hazardous weather forecasts. To help guide the design of adaptive sensing algorithms, an understanding of how often storms should be revisited by a radar system is needed. One of the many factors that contribute to determining revisit period for a storm is the minimum revisit frequency needed to maintain accurate tracks. In this paper, methods are developed to study this requisite revisit period. These methods depend on simulations of storm tracks that mimic real-world storm motions. Using these simulations, a tracking algorithm can be objectively evaluated to study how its results degrade with respect to update periods. A preliminary analysis to examine the performance degradation in a variety of meteorological setups is presented, focusing particularly on dense and sparse storm events and mixed storm motion behaviors.