Comparison of Typhoon Centers From SAR and IR Images and Those From Best Track Data Sets

This paper compares the typhoon centers from the tropical cyclone best track (BT) data sets of three meteorological agencies and those from synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and infrared (IR) images. First, we carried out algorithm comparison using two newly developed algorithms and one existing wavelet-based algorithm, which were used to extract typhoon eyes in six SAR images and two IR images. These case studies showed that the extracted eyes by the three algorithms are consistent with each other. The differences among them are relatively small. However, there is a systematic difference between the extracted centers and the typhoon centers from the three BT data sets, which were interpolated to the imaging times first. We then compared the typhoon centers determined from 25 SAR and 43 IR images with those from the three BT data sets to investigate the performance of the latter at the sea surface and at the cloud top, respectively. We found that the typhoon centers from the three BT data sets are generally closer to the locations extracted from the SAR images showing sea-surface imprints of the typhoons than those from the IR images showing cloud-top structures of the typhoons.