Lightning Clustering-Based Thunderstorm Recognition and Tracking Algorithm and Its Application

The development of thunderstorms has a life cycle, but the occurrence of thunderstorms is not completely independent. There may be several thunderstorms that are close in time and space. If lightings belong to different thunderstorms are treated as the lightings from one storm, it will lead to wrong conclusions. Therefore, in this paper, the amount of and frequency of lightnings are used to identify the occurrence and development of thunderstorms, a nearest neighbor clustering method is studied. This method can be used to distinguish lightnings occurred from different thunderstorms and indicate the occurrence and development of thunderstorms. The lightning clustering algorithm can also be applied to identify and track of thunderstorms. All work finally is realized by map display on the software platform.