Tropical Cyclone Risk Assessment Using Statistical Models2012

Tropical cyclones (TC) in the western North Pacific (WNP) pose a serious threat to the coastal regions of Eastern Asia when they make landfall. The limited amount of observational data and the high computational cost of running TC-permitting dynamical models indicate a need for statistical models that can simulate large ensembles of TCs in order to cover the full range of possible activity that results from a given climate change. I construct and apply a statistical track model from the 1945-2007 observed "best tracks" in the IBTrACS database for the WNP. The lifecycle components--genesis, track propagation, and death--of each simulated track is determined stochastically based on the statistics of historical occurrences. The length scale that dictates what historical data to consider as...