Tracking Convective Storms and their Environments with the tobac Tracking Package

Understanding how convective storms respond to changes in their environment on a local scale is critical to begin to elucidate how Earth’s changing climate will affect storms globally. There is now a vast amount of storm-scale observational data, including from geostationary and low-earth orbiting satellites and ground-based observing systems. However, employing these datasets to build comprehensive databases of convective storms and the local environments that form them requires new analysis methodologies. Here, in preparation for the NASA INCUS satellite mission, we have used the tobac tracking package to identify, track and analyze storms and their environments with these big datasets. Using tobac to track storms with geostationary satellite and ground-based radar data, we have built a comprehensive, months-long database of convective storms over their entire lifetime. For each individual convective storm, the database contains their formation environments (including convective available potential energy, wind shear, etc.), evolution over time, and, where applicable, additional data, such as those from low earth orbiting satellites. In this presentation, we will employ this vast database of clouds and storms to quantify the relationship, on a storm scale, between thermodynamic and dynamic environments and storm properties, including lifetime, growth rate, and ice and liquid water paths.