Short-term quantitative precipitation forecasting using an object-based approach

Short-term Quantitative Precipitation Forecasting (SQPF) is critical for flash-flood warning, navigation safety, and many other applications. The current study proposes a new object-based method, named PERCAST (PERsiann-ForeCAST), to identify, track, and nowcast storms. PERCAST predicts the location and rate of rainfall up to 4 h using the most recent storm images to extract storm features, such as advection field and changes in storm intensity and size. PERCAST is coupled with a previously developed precipitation retrieval algorithm called PERSIANN-CCS (Precipitation Estimation from Remotely Sensed Information using Artificial Neural Networks-Cloud Classification System) to forecast rainfall rates. Four case studies have been presented to evaluate the performance of the models. While the first two case studies justify the model capabilities in nowcasting single storms, the third and fourth case studies evaluate the proposed model over the contiguous US during the summer of 2010. The results show that, by considering storm Growth and Decay (GD) trends for the prediction, the PERCAST-GD further improves the predictability of convection in terms of verification parameters such as Probability of Detection (POD) and False Alarm Ratio (FAR) up to 15-20%, compared to the comparison algorithms such as PERCAST. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.