A simplified method for the detection of convection using high resolution imagery from GOES-16 Yoonjin Lee1, Christian D. Kummerow1,2, Milija Zupanski2 1Department of Atmospheric Science, Colorado state university, Fort Collins, CO 80521, USA 5 2Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere, Colorado state university, Fort Collins, CO 80521, USA Correspondence to: Yoonjin Lee (
[email protected]) Abstract. The ability to detect convective regions and adding heating in these regions is the most important skill in forecasting severe weather systems. Since radars are most directly related to precipitation and are available in high temporal resolution, their data are often used for both detecting convection and estimating latent heating. However, radar data are limited to land areas, 10 largely in developed nations, and early convection is not detectable from radars until drops become large enough to produce significant echoes. Visible and Infrared sensors on a geostationary satellite can provide data that are more sensitive to small droplets, but they also have shortcomings: their information is almost exclusively from the cloud top. Relatively new geostationary satellites, Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites-16 and -17 (GOES-16 and GOES-17), along with Himawari-8, can make up for some of this lack of vertical information through the use of very high spatial and temporal 15 resolutions. This study develops two algorithms to detect convection at vertically growing clouds and mature convective clouds using 1-minute GOES-16 Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) data. Two case studies are used to explain the two methods, followed by results applied to one month of data over the contiguous United States.