Environmental variables for predicting hurricanes?

Question

I'm trying to predict hurricane count in the Caribbean using a poisson regression, and I am following a book by Elsner and Jagger which gives details on how to do so using R.
Their book is concerned with hurricane landfalls in the US. However, since my area of interest is further south of this, I'm wondering if the environmental variables described in the book still apply.
The variables are:
1) Atlantic sea surface temperature (SST) derived from Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation as an indicator of oceanic heat content:
https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/data/correlation/amon.us.long.mean.data

2) Southern Oscillation Index (SOI) related to El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) as indicator of wind shear:
https://climatedataguide.ucar.edu/sites/default/files/SOI.signal.annstd.txt

3) Northern Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) as an indicator of steering flow:
https://crudata.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/nao/nao.dat

4) Sunspot number (SSN) as an indicator of upper air temperature:
https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/gcos_wgsp/Timeseries/Data/sunspot.long.data

Now, I ran my poisson regression model and found that NAO and SSN were statistically insignificant (p-values were greater than 0.4).
SST was significant with p-value less than 0.01 and SOI was significant with p-value less than 0.05.

Are these environmental variables suitable? They seem to deal with the North Atlantic and I'm therefore not sure if they would affect the southern Caribbean as much as the US.

TQ · Accepted Answer

Would be surprised to find NAO had much ... if any ... effect on low-latitude tropical systems.

You might find predictive value in level of Saharan dust in the main development region (MDR).  Maybe the strength and position of the Bermuda HIGH.

Anonymous · Answer

Many people believe that the US government deliberately causes some hurricanes and environmental disasters (like the Haiti so-called "earthquake") with secret technology. At the very least, the government knew that Hurricane Katrina was coming and deliberately chose not to inform the people of New Orleans about it so as to commit a deliberate genocide of the black people there. On top of that, they refused to give the black victims and survivors any financial compensation/aid like they gave to the white victims of 9/11 and Hurricane Sandy. This is the kind of racist and satanic country that America is.

tellitlikeitis · Answer

'Southern' in relation to the Caribbean is a very vague term.  The southernmost part of the Caribbean, i.e. Guyana which is actually included as Caribbean, (albeit geographically in the continent of South America) and is outside of the hurricane belt, as is Trinidad and Tobago.  Terms to describe the geographic areas of the Caribbean are the Leeward chain of islands and the Windwards.  You'd need to be a tad more specific.  I think you'll find that the northern Windwards and the Leewards are considerably more affected by hurricanes than are the southernmost Windwards.

Trending News

Environmental variables for predicting hurricanes?

3 Answers