Afternoon at GISS

Tim Hall at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies invited me to give a seminar on statistical hurricane modeling. A link to my presentation is below. Tim, with Stephen Jewson, is doing some interesting work on modeling hurricane tracks, so far mainly in the Atlantic. He has some papers on the GISS web site which you can download. He’s using this work to better quantify landfall frequencies, which are of obvious interest. What I found most intriguing is that he’s able to show how the location of tropical storm cyclogenesis shifts towards Africa as sea surface temperature increases. Storms born here can tend to be stronger, but they are also less likely to make landfall in the US because of the greater distance. I got some good comments on my model. Some people did not like that I used the AMO and instead asked for direct SST measures. Well, some like the AMO and some don’t. But I’m perfectly happy to try SSTs. At the least, it’ll make m...