Characteristic Scales of Tropical Convection Based on the Japanese Advanced Himawari-8 Imager Observations

Convective activities play an important role in tropical weather systems. To investigate the characteristic scales of convection, a method combining a principal component (PC) analysis with Fourier decomposition is applied to brightness temperature observations from Advanced Himawari-8 Imager (AHI). Characteristic scales of different modes in tropical convective systems are obtained. The explained variance reduces rapidly from the first to the 60th PC mode by two magnitudes; the horizontal scale decreases from over 2000 km to about 100 km, and the timescale changes from more than 4 days to around 5 h. By a detailed comparison of the first, 20th, 40th, and 60th PC modes, it is found that large-scale (over 2000 km in wavelength) convective activities usually have significant nocturnal enhancement, whereas meso-scale (about 100 km in wavelength) convective activities feature short period and fast change with more intense development in regions of active large-scale convection. This study may be of some importance for the choice of AHI data assimilation cycling interval, the horizontal resolution as well as data thinning for geostationary satellite observations.