Hurricane Simulation and Nonstationary Extremal Analysis for a Changing Climate

TL;DR

This paper develops nonstationary extreme value models for hurricane central pressure minima and a Poisson process for hurricane event returns, enabling more accurate risk assessments of maximum wind speeds in a changing climate.

Contribution

It introduces nonstationary models for hurricane central pressure minima and event occurrence rates, validated with historical data, to improve windspeed risk estimates.

Findings

Higher maximum windspeed estimates for all regions along the North Atlantic Coast.

The models align well with historical data and suggest increased risks in a changing climate.

Maximum windspeeds are highest in the northern coast region.

Abstract

Particularly important to hurricane risk assessment for coastal regions is finding accurate approximations of return probabilities of maximum windspeeds. Since extremes in maximum windspeed have a direct relationship to minimums in the central pressure, accurate windspeed return estimates rely heavily on proper modeling of the central pressure minima. Using the HURDAT2 database, we show that the central pressure minima of hurricane events can be appropriately modeled by a nonstationary extreme value distribution. We also provide and validate a Poisson distribution with a nonstationary rate parameter to model returns of hurricane events. Using our nonstationary models and numerical simulation techniques from established literature, we perform a simulation study to model returns of maximum windspeeds of hurricane events along the North Atlantic Coast. We show that our revised model agrees with current data and results in an expectation of higher maximum windspeeds for all regions along the coast with the highest maximum windspeeds occurring in the northern part of the coast.