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 my model a better forecast model.
Didn’t get to meet Hansen, as he’s obviously too busy most of the time. Tim told me that he receives so many requests to come and give talks, that some of the other staff sometimes takes his place.
Here is my talk, in PDF format. Not too many words on the slides, I’m afraid, as I really hate words on slides. Nothing worse than having somebody read words on a slide that everybody in the room can already see. But you can go to my resume page and download the paper to get some words.
