link to sheilaaliens youtube page: http://www.youtube.com/sheilaaliens
Link to the .pdf for the TITAN storm tracking “users guide”.. from UCAR.edu..
Download the .pdf here:
To begin at the beginning – TITAN is an acronym which stands for Thunderstorm Identification Tracking Analysis and Nowcasting. Development started in the early 90’s by Dixon and Wiener. Dr Michael Dixon, an ex-South African, based the software on his storm-tracking software used in the pre-TITAN era in South Africa. Since then TITAN has gone through many revisions and has grown in scope, complexity and diversity.
TITAN has been used extensively for weather modification operations and also analysis. There are XX radar data acquisition system RDAS and TITAN systems currently running in operational cloud seeding programmes outside of South Africa. Locally the RDAS-TITAN combination is running with all 12 South African radars. TITAN is also the display for the merging system in use, producing the web page products.
or here is another front page version:
Background
The Thunderstorm Identification, Tracking, Analysis and Nowcasting (TITAN) project began in 1982 as an effort to objectively identify and analyze thunderstorms for the purpose of evaluating cloud-seeding activities aimed at rain enhancement in South Africa. TITAN originally referred just to the applications which identified and tracked the storms, and which analyzed their properties.
Over time users have come to view TITAN as the entire software system which supports the storm analysis, rather than just the storm-specific applications. This system includes applications which ingest data, convert data formats, perform analysis, display results and make the data available for use on other systems. It also includes the infrastructure which allows users to start and run the applications in a real-time project.
What does TITAN do?
As mentioned above, TITAN started as a tool for the evaluation of cloud seeding programs, but since then has grown in scope. The TITAN system now has components which perform the following types of task:
• ingest of data from various types of weather radar;
• ingest of other types of data such as aircraft tracks, lightning, satellite and model data;
• remapping of radar data into Cartesian coordinates;
• merging of individual radars into a 3-D mosaic;
• clutter and AP identification and removal;
• filtering of bright-band echo;
• storm and echo tracking and forecasting;
• precipitation estimation;
• computation of VIL and storm severity.
The TITAN system has the capability of running in real-time mode. In this mode it processes new data as it arrives. The system has high-reliability features such as an auto-restart mechanism to restart processes which die for any reason.
TITAN also has an analysis mode, in which applications can be run on data sets which were collected during real-time operations, or obtained from an outside data source.
General information on TITAN storm tracking:
http://www.ral.ucar.edu/projects/titan/docs/