Convective clouds modelling and tracking by an airborne radar

A method for modelling and tracking convective clouds within radar images is described. Clouds are non-rigid heterogeneous objects; a good representation of the weather scene is performed by extracting skeletal lines of the 2-dimensional grayscale pictures. Skeletons are reduced to sets of segments within a graph structure and tracked among successive pictures by means of relaxation labelling processes. We present preliminary results of our method on airborne weather radar data. The conventional morphological skeleton constraint -i.e., to be centered in relation to the object boundaries- is here replaced by attachment to the gray levels local maxima. The resulting skeletal line is forced to go through each intense convective cell, and links neighboring ones into a global structure. Moreover, each feature point can be labelled and enriched by meteorological information. Such pattern is particularly suitable for weather nowcasting, since the user (for example, an aircraft´s crew) is specially interested in the convective cells evolution.