Predicting basin and landfalling hurricane numbers from sea surface temperature

TL;DR

This paper develops a multi-step prediction scheme for hurricane numbers, first forecasting sea surface temperatures, then basin hurricanes, and finally US landfalling hurricanes, based on empirical SST-hurricane relationships.

Contribution

It introduces an integrated prediction framework combining SST forecasts with hurricane number predictions, enhancing accuracy of landfall hurricane forecasts.

Findings

Empirical relationship established between SST and basin hurricane numbers.

Combined SST and hurricane prediction model demonstrated.

Improved landfall hurricane forecasts achieved.

Abstract

We are building a hurricane number prediction scheme based on first predicting main development region sea surface temperature (SST), then predicting the number of hurricanes in the Atlantic basin given the SST prediction, and finally predicting the number of US landfalling hurricanes based on the prediction of the number of basin hurricanes. We have described a number of SST prediction methods in previous work. We now investigate the empirical relationship between SST and basin hurricane numbers, and put this together with the SST predictions to make predictions of both basin and landfalling hurricane numbers.