Analysis and Application of the Relationship between Cumulonimbus (Cb) Cloud Features and Precipitation

Although cumulonimbus (Cb) clouds are the main source of precipitation in south China, the relationship between Cb cloud characteristics and precipitation remains unclear. Accordingly, the primary objective of this study was to thoroughly analyze the relationship between Cb cloud features and precipitation both at the pixel and cloud patch scale, and then to apply it in precipitation estimation in the Huaihe River Basin using China’s first operational geostationary meteorological satellite, FengYun-2C (FY-2C), and the hourly precipitation data of 286 gauges from 2007. First, 31 Cb parameters (14 parameters of three pixel features and 17 parameters of four cloud patch features) were extracted based on a Cb tracking method using an artificial neural network (ANN) cloud classification as a pre-processing procedure to identify homogeneous Cb patches. Then, the relationship between Cb cloud properties and precipitation was analyzed and applied in a look-up table algorithm to estimate precipitation. The results were as follows: (1) Precipitation increases first and then declines with increasing values for cold cloud and time evolution parameters, OPEN ACCESS Atmosphere 2014, 5 212 and heavy precipitation may occur not only near the convective center, but also on the front of the Cb clouds on the pixel scale. (2) As for the cloud patch scale, precipitation is typically associated with cold cloud and rough cloud surfaces, whereas the coldest and roughest cloud surfaces do not correspond to the strongest rain. Moreover, rainfall has no obvious relationship with the cloud motion features and varies significantly over different life stages. The involvement of mergers and splits of minor Cb patches is crucial for precipitation processes. (3) The correlation coefficients of the estimated rain rate and gauge rain can reach 0.62 in the cross-validation period and 0.51 in the testing period, which indicates the feasibility of the further application of the relationship in precipitation estimation.