Ahmet Birol Kara

Back in the middle 1990's I had the great fortune to work with and help mentor A. Birol Kara. Birol was a graduate student in meteorology when he approached me and asked if I needed help with a book project I was starting. I quickly put him to work drafting figures. It was clear from the start that Birol was a remarkable student. He approached his work with the utmost care and from a deep analytical perspective. This gave me the opportunity to try new ideas and approaches to the study of hurricanes and climate. I decided he would be co-author and the book would be a joint effort. Although his research passion remained in understanding the physics of the atmospheric boundary layer and in air-sea interaction his habits of the mind help me became a better scientist. In the years following the book project I got to know Birol personally and counted him as a friend. In fact I believe Birol's deep sense of loyalty to himself, family and friends helps explains his approach to research; an approach rooted in the "brutally honest", which I too often find lacking in climate research. After obtaining his Ph.D., Birol worked at the Naval Research Laboratory and lived in New Orleans. Tragically he died of cancer a few weeks ago. His legacy will live on through his publications and through those who were lucky to know him.

Catastrophe Finance: An Emerging Academic Discipline

The recent and on-going events in the world's financial markets demonstrate that finance theory remains far from perfected. Meanwhile, the threat of natural disasters continues to increase due to population growth, economic development, climate changes, geologic activity, and political unrest. To better understand and predict natural disasters and their consequences research and training are needed at the interface of geoscience and economics. New academic programs for graduate students in the area of catastrophe finance would help fill this need and could provide better tools and models for risk management and assessment. In turn, greater awareness of the geosciences by market professionals could help assist the spread of scientific knowledge. Importantly, such programs would train the next generation of professionals in finance and environmental organizations to use markets to the advantage of environmental programs and to anticipate the adverse consequences of financial innovation necessary for creating a sustainable future.

Eos, v90, 281-282. [membership required].

Listen to a BBC Radio 4 Podcast interview with Quentin Cooper.

A New Way to Define Anomalous Years

Recently we used networks to examine year-to-year relationships in hurricane activity. This requires mapping the time series of hurricane counts onto a network. In this way the network is physically related to the variation of hurricanes from one year to the next. This idea is relatively new and was introduced by Lacasa et al. [2008]. By doing this we address the following two questions: How can the occurrence of hurricane landfalls over time be examined from the perspective of network analysis? And, what advantages are gained from this perspective? The intellectual merit of the work is an advance in our understanding of historical coastal hurricane activity and the broader impact is a new method for identifying anomalies from time series data. The paper will appear in a forthcoming issue of Geophysical Research Letters. It is coauthored with Thomas Jagger and Emily Fogarty.

The picture shows the visibility network based on the time series of U.S. hurricane counts over the period 1851--2008. The colors indicate the node degree (number of links); 2 or less (red), 3--5 (orange), 6--10 (yellow), 11--20 (green), 21--30 (blue), and more than 30 (dark blue). The network suggests a novel way to think about anomalies in a time series. Years are anomalous not in a statistical sense of violating a Poisson assumption, but in the sense that the temporal ordering of the counts identifies a year that is unique in that it has a large count but is surrounded in time by years with low counts. Thus we contend that node degree is a useful indicator of an anomalous year. That is, a year that stands above most of the other years, but particularly above its "neighboring" years represents more of an anomaly in physical terms than does a year that is simply well-above the average. Node degree captures information about the frequency of hurricanes for a given year and information about the relationship of that frequency to the frequencies over the given year's recent history and near future. With this definition 1985 stands out as the most anomalous of the hurricane years with 1933, 1886, and 1964 also unusual.

Lacasa, L., B. Luque, F. Ballesteros, J. Luque, and J.C. Nuno (2008), From time series to complex networks: The visibility graph. Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci., USA, 105, 4972--4875.

Summit Summary

The 2nd International Summit on Hurricanes and Climate Change was held May 31-Jun 5th in Corfu, Greece. Judging by the level of science and by the participants enthusiasm for doing it again, the Summit was an overwhelming success. There were participants from 17 countries. The relative frequency of participants by country is plotted as a word cloud (using wordle). There were 25 participants from the USA, 8 from Germany and China, 7 from France, 6 from Australia and Bermuda, and 5 from the UK. A word cloud illustrating the relative frequency of keywords from the participants abstract titles is also shown.





Summary points arising from the talks and discussions (with help from Rick Murnane):

1. Although there were a few skeptics, most in attendance would agree that there appears to be an upward trend in the intensity of the strongest tropical cyclones worldwide. Although there does not appear to be a trend associated with the global frequency of tropical cyclones.
2. There is a growing appreciation among the participants for a significant feedback relationship between TC activity and weather and climate events on the inter-annual time scale and on spatial scales that extend across latitudes.
3. The availability of quality archival and proxy records of hurricane activity is increasing. These data hold the potential to provide new insights into the linkages between climate variation and tropical cyclone activity.
4. The idea that Atlantic tropical cyclone activity is controlled by changes in relative sea-surface temperature rather than local sea-surface temperature was discounted on physical and statistical grounds.

The Summit was sponsored by Aegean Conferences, the Risk Prediction Initiative, and Climatek.

Travel awards to help defray some of the costs for students were given to N. Jourdain, R. Hodges, H. Kim, S. Lavender, M. Lenard, J. Malmstadt, K. Sheitlin, A. Suzuki-Parker, E. Vincent, A. Werner. The talks are being made available here.

Plans are to have Springer publish an edited book of the proceedings.

Plans are underway to hold the 3rd International Summit on Hurricanes and Climate Change in 2011 on the spectacularly beautiful island of Santorini.

Follow the Summit

The 2nd International Summit on Hurricanes and Climate Change takes place in Corfu starting next Monday. We will archive podcasts of the talks here. The speaker list includes:

June 1
Session 1: M Chenoweth, K Walsh, JL McBride, F Chauvin, R Romero
Session 2: JB Elsner, JD Woodruff, AV Fedorov, K Oouchi

June 2
Session 3: RE Hart, B Soden, ME Mann, A Khain, J Done
Session 4: GJ Holland, YM Tourre, JP Kossin, S Gentile

June 3
Session 5: K Emanuel, SL Lavender, D Liu, B Owens, C Liu
Session 6: J Nott, C Welker, A Osso, AS Daloz

June 4
Session 7: AA Tsonis, K Scheitlin, DJ Vimont, C Wang, J Rumpf
Session 8: PS Chu, R Kumar, S Rahmstorf, MR Lowry

Prelude to the 2nd Summit on Hurricanes & Climate Change, Corfu, Greece

Florida Hurricanes and Damage Costs