Predicting hurricane numbers from Sea Surface Temperature: closed form expressions for the mean, variance and standard error of the number of hurricanes

TL;DR

This paper derives closed-form expressions for the mean, variance, and standard error of hurricane numbers based on sea surface temperature models, facilitating improved predictions of hurricane activity.

Contribution

It provides new analytical formulas for predicting hurricane counts from sea surface temperature, enhancing existing statistical models.

Findings

Closed-form solutions for mean hurricane numbers

Explicit variance and standard error formulas

Applicable to parametric sea surface temperature models

Abstract

One way to predict hurricane numbers would be to predict sea surface temperature, and then predict hurricane numbers as a function of the predicted sea surface temperature. For certain parametric models for sea surface temperature and the relationship between sea surface temperature and hurricane numbers, closed-form solutions exist for the mean and the variance of the number of predicted hurricanes, and for the standard error on the mean. We derive a number of such expressions.