Advanced clouds tracking for airborne weather radar & ground primary surveillance radar

A method for modeling and tracking convective clouds within radar images is presented. An object modeling approach is used, based on the extraction of either morphological or grayscale skeletons from 2-dimensionnal cross-section of 3-dimensional radar data. Grayscale skeletons are appropriate shape descriptors for non-rigid and heterogeneous objects, in which gray-level local maxima correspond to regions of interest. The modeling scheme is enhanced by meta-data linked to some chosen points of the skeleton; this provides a good representation of the weather scene in terms of hazards for an aircraft. Skeletons are stored within a graph structure and tracked among successive pictures by means of relaxation labeling processes. The deduced advection field is used to now cast the clouds evolution. Satisfying results are obtained concerning advection forecasts. Convective activity forecasts are promising, even if they must be carefully interpreted.