Discipline: Mathematics and Statistics
Subcategory: Mathematics and Statistics
Session: 4
Room: Park Tower 8219
Jiehao Huang - The City College of New York
Co-Author(s): James Booth, The City College of New York, NY; Jieying Yu, Fort Hamilton High School; David Chen, Urban Assembly Gateway School for Technology
As the overall population and infrastructure along the US East Coast increases, it becomes increasingly important to study the characteristics of tropical cyclones that can impact the coast. A recent NOAA study shows that the propagation speed of tropical cyclones has slowed over the past 60 years, which can lead to greater precipitation impacts and greater storm surge impacts. The study presented herein is meant to examine and analyze the relationships that exist between the propagation speed of hurricanes, their surface wind strength, directional angles, and precipitation. This data includes the tracks of tropical cyclones spanning from 1948-2013. This analysis examines the Lagrangian evolution of the cyclones in terms of their propagation speed and directional movement of hurricane path. Then the analysis is repeated for propagation speed versus maximum surface wind speed. The results show a positive correlation between hurricane propagation speed and maximum surface wind speed in the historical record. The directional propagation speed analysis shows that hurricanes move the fastest when they turn eastward especially at 0-45°, followed by westward and poleward directions. Additionally, displacement angle analysis of hurricane paths describes the abrupt change of angles every six hourly, and directional shift tendency of hurricane shows a significant increasing trend. This research highlights an interesting question about the trends in hurricanes over the past 60 years related to the subtle differences in the behavior of the propagation speed and the max surface wind strength.
Funder Acknowledgement(s): The authors also thank the Pinkerton Foundation and the American Museum of Natural History
Faculty Advisor: James Booth, jbooth@ccny.cuny.edu
Role: This research that was mostly conducted by me under the assistants and instructions of my mentor James Booth. Additionally, I have two high school mentees in the summer 2019 who participated and contributed into this research. They are from 2019 High School Initiative in Remote Sensing of the Earth Systems Science & Engineering (HIRES) Scholar. Throughout the research, I am responsible for develop algorithm to analyze the tropical cyclone dataset with applying various statistical analysis in MATLAB to read, analyze, and plot data from satellite data.