What is Hurricane Climatology?

Hurricane Climatology on Prezi

3rd International Summit Talks

Talks given at the 3rd International Summit on Hurricanes and Climate Change are now available at http://ciquestudios.com/hurricaneclimate/. Enjoy.

Summit summary

Statistical models of regional and clustered tropical cyclone (TC) activity are being developed and tested. High resolution and detailed microphysical models are capable of physically realistic models of TC behavior. General circulation models are still poor at resolving the frequency and intensity of TCs on the inter-annual time scale. There seems to be little, if any, correlation between the skill at forecasting TC frequency and model resolution. Maximum potential intensity (MPI) theory is improved by considering slantwise convection. The MPI theory continues to be important in explaining TC activity, especially in the North Atlantic. Paleotempestology is maturing as a discipline and important new results about basin-wide and global TC activity will likely ensue. New insights about historical hurricanes are possible using synoptic analysis on reanalysis data and weather prediction models. We will convene again in 2013.

3rd International Summit on Hurricanes & Climate Change

June 27-July 2, 2011, Rhodes, GREECE. It promises to be a good one. Check out the program. Props go to Ian Elsner for designing and editing the video.

Crazy guys yelling at a tornado

While hot air swirls on whether climate change is affecting tornadoes, I take a break on May 24, 2011 to chase down a few storms in Oklahoma with my son Ian and his friend Nic Parsons.

Hurricane clusters in the vicinity of Florida

Models that predict annual U.S. hurricane activity assume a Poisson distribution for the counts. This assumption leads to a forecast that under predicts both the number of years without hurricanes and the number of years with three or more Florida hurricanes. The under dispersion in forecast counts arises from a tendency for hurricanes to arrive in groups along this part of the U.S. coastline. We recently developed an extension to our earlier Poisson model that assumes the rate of hurricane clusters follows a Poisson distribution with cluster size capped at two hurricanes.

Hindcasts from the cluster model better fit the distribution of Florida hurricanes conditional on the climate covariates including the NAO and SOI. Results are similar to models that parameterize the extra-Poisson variation in the observed counts including the negative binomial and the Poisson inverse Gaussian, but we argue that the cluster model is physically consistent with the way Florida hurricanes tend to arrive in groups.

This research is done in collaboration with Thomas H. Jagger (Climatek) and is supported by the Risk Prediction Initiative. It is currently in review with the AMS Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology.

Statistical models for tropical cyclone activity

In collaboration with Gabriele Villarini and as part of the U.S. CLIVAR working group on hurricanes, I've written a short summary paper on statistical models for tropical cyclone activity. The paper is available here. The data for the R code are available here. The document was created using Sweave, LaTeX and R. The work is part of a larger project to publish a book on this topic with Oxford University Press. Comments and suggestions are certainly welcome.