Tracking of Tropical Intraseasonal Convective Anomalies: 1. Seasonality of the Tropical Intraseasonal Oscillations

A tracking algorithm based upon a multiple object tracking method is developed to identify, track, and classify Tropical Intraseasonal Oscillations (TISO) on the basis of their direction of propagation. Daily National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Outgoing Longwave Radiation anomalies from 1979–2017 are Lanczos band-pass filtered for the intraseasonal time scale (20–100 days) and spatially averaged with nine neighboring points to get spatially smoothed anomalies over large spatial scales (~10⁵ km²). TISO events are tracked by using a two-stage Kalman filter predictor-corrector method. Two dominant components of the TISO (Eastward propagating and Northward propagating) are classified, and it is found that TISO remains active throughout the year. Eastward-propagating TISO events occur from November to April with a phase speed of ~4 m/s and northward-propagating TISO events occur from May to October with a phase speed of ~2.5 m/s in both the Indian and Pacific Ocean basins. Composites of the mean background states (wind; sea surface temperature, SST; and moisture) reveal that the co-occurrence of warm SST and mean westerly zonal wind plays an important role in the direction of propagation and the geographical location of TISO events. In mean state sensitivity experiments with Sp-CAM4, we have found that the seasonality of TISO in terms of the geographical location of occurrences and direction of propagation is primarily associated with the annual march of the maximum SST and low level zonal wind which tends to follow the SST.