2016 TC cloud segmentation

We present a framework to quantify the radiationfrom tropical cyclones (TCs) in shortwave (SW, < 3 micron)and longwave (LW, > 3 micron) portions of the electromagneticspectrum. The framework includes two stages: segmentation ofTC clouds and calculation of the radiation effects attributableto TC clouds. The segmentation task was accomplished by analgorithm which takes a time series of brightness temperatureimages of TCs and uses image processing techniques to acquiresegmentation for each image in a semi-supervised manner. Theradiation was calculated by combining the segmentation resultswith the Cloud and Earth’s Radiant Energy System datasetvia a coordinate-matching scheme due to their difference inresolution. The framework was implemented to analyse the netcontribution of TCs to the upwelling radiation in 2016 at regionaland global scales. Results show that TCs contributed a net totalof 40.52 TW of radiation to the global upwelling radiation froma positive contribution of 321.41 TW in reflected shortwaveradiation and negative contribution of 280.89 TW in emittedlongwave radiation.