Km-scale simulations of mesoscale convective systems over South America - a feature tracker intercomparison

Mesoscale convective systems (MCSs) are clusters of thunderstorms that are important in Earth's water and energy cycle. Additionally, they are responsible for extreme events such as large hail, strong winds, and extreme precipitation. Automated object-based analyses that track MCSs have become popular since they allow us to identify and follow MCSs over their entire life cycle in a Lagrangian framework. This rise in popularity was accompanied by an increasing number of MCS tracking algorithms, however, little is known about how sensitive analyses are concerning the MCS tracker formulation. Here, we assess differences between six MCS tracking algorithms on South American MCS characteristics and evaluate MCSs in kilometer-scale simulations with observational-based MCSs over 3 years. All trackers are run with a common set of MCS classification criteria to isolate tracker formulation differences. The tracker formulation substantially impacts MCS characteristics such as frequency, size, duration, and contribution to total precipitation. The evaluation of simulated MCS characteristics is less sensitive to the tracker formulation and all trackers agree that the model can capture MCS characteristics well across different South American climate zones. Dominant sources of uncertainty are the segmentation of cloud systems in space and time and the treatment of how MCSs are linked in time. Our results highlight that comparing MCS analyses that use different tracking algorithms is challenging. We provide general guidelines on how MCS characteristics compare between trackers to facilitate a more robust assessment of MCS statistics in future studies.

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Bounding Box South Lat N/A
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Related Dataset #1 : NCEP/CPC L3 Half Hourly 4km Global (60S - 60N) Merged IR V1

Related Software #1 : tobac - Tracking and Object-based Analysis of Clouds

Related Software #2 : knubez/TAMS: v0.1.2

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Author Prein, Andreas
Feng, Z.
Fiolleau, T.
Moon, Zachary
Núñez Ocasio, Kelly M.
Kukulies, Julia
Roca, R.
Varble, A. C.
Rehbein, A.
Liu, Changhai
Ikeda, Kyoko
Mu, Y.
Rasmussen, Roy M.
Publisher UCAR/NCAR - Library
Publication Date 2024-04-28T00:00:00
Digital Object Identifier (DOI) Not Assigned
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Topic Category geoscientificInformation
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Metadata Date 2025-07-10T20:02:37.501206
Metadata Record Identifier edu.ucar.opensky::articles:27173
Metadata Language eng; USA
Suggested Citation Prein, Andreas, Feng, Z., Fiolleau, T., Moon, Zachary, Núñez Ocasio, Kelly M., Kukulies, Julia, Roca, R., Varble, A. C., Rehbein, A., Liu, Changhai, Ikeda, Kyoko, Mu, Y., Rasmussen, Roy M.. (2024). Km-scale simulations of mesoscale convective systems over South America - a feature tracker intercomparison. UCAR/NCAR - Library. https://n2t.org/ark:/85065/d7cr5zk7. Accessed 04 August 2025.

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