[1] This study examines a hurricane prediction system that uses an ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF) to assimilate high‐ resolution airborne radar observations for convection‐ permitting hurricane initialization and forecasting. This system demonstrated very promising performance, especially on hurricane intensity forecasts, through experiments over all 61 applicable NOAA P‐3 airborne Doppler missi...

Media agenda setting refers to the deliberate coverage of topics or events with the goal of influencing public opinion and public policy. We conducted a quantitative content analysis of 4 prominent newspapers to examine how the media gathered and distributed news to shape public policy priorities during Hurricane Katrina. The media framed most Hurricane Katrina stories by emphasizing government...

The National Hurricane Center and the National Hurricane Research Laboratory joined forces in a n effort t o improvc techniques for forecasting hurricanc motion in the spring of 1959 when the latter moved its headquarters from West Palm Beach to Miami into offices adjacent to those occupied by the principal hurricane forecast office in the United States. Results now available from verification ...

Call for Papers Hurricane Katrina (2005) devastated New Orleans thereby revealing inherent vulnerabilities that resided in the socio/political/ecological/technical infrastructure (system) of the city and the nation. The event highlighted the ‘...city’s fragile physical environment, aging infrastructure, and declining economic and social structure’ (Comfort, 2006:1). Comfort (2006:2) asks the qu...

Call for Papers Hurricane Katrina (2005) devastated New Orleans thereby revealing inherent vulnerabilities that resided in the socio/political/ecological/technical infrastructure (system) of the city and the nation. The event highlighted the ‘...city’s fragile physical environment, aging infrastructure, and declining economic and social structure’ (Comfort, 2006:1). Comfort (2006:2) asks the qu...

‘‘Best tracks’’ are National Hurricane Center (NHC) poststorm analyses of the intensity, central pressure, position, and size of Atlantic and eastern North Pacific basin tropical and subtropical cyclones. This paper estimates the uncertainty (average error) for Atlantic basin best track parameters through a survey of the NHC Hurricane Specialists who maintain and update the Atlantic hurricane d...

Trajectories of tropical cyclones may show large deviations from predicted tracks leading to uncertainty as to their landfall location for example. Prediction schemes usually render this uncertainty by showing track forecast cones representing the most probable region for the location of a cyclone during a period of time. By using the statistical properties of these deviations, we propose a sim...

One possible method for predicting landfalling hurricane numbers is to first predict the number of hurricanes in the basin and then convert that prediction to a prediction of landfalling hurricane numbers using an estimated proportion. Should this work better than just predicting landfalling hurricane numbers directly? We perform a basic statistical analysis of this question in the context of a...

After Hurricane Katrina, the number of reported cases of West Nile neuroinvasive disease (WNND) sharply increased in the hurricane-affected regions of Louisiana and Mississippi. In 2006, a >2-fold increase in WNND incidence was observed in the hurricane-affected areas than in previous years.

We find that long-period variations in tropical cyclone and hurricane frequency over the past century in the North Atlantic Ocean have occurred as three relatively stable regimes separated by sharp transitions. Each regime has seen 50% more cyclones and hurricanes than the previous regime and is associated with a distinct range of sea surface temperatures (SSTs) in the eastern Atlantic Ocean. O...