The climatology of inland winds from tropical cyclones in the eastern United States

Over the past several years, attempts have been made to assess the relative frequency of coastal and inland counties that experience either hurricane or tropical storm force winds from a landfalling tropical cyclone. This is traditionally done by overlaying the historical track data for the Atlantic basin and implementing a symmetrical 50 km buffer around the storm to identify those counties which are influenced by the storm. This presentation will focus on a new analysis technique which employs a climatological average of the storm size during the lifecycle of the storm. The storm-size averages were determined for North Atlantic basin tropical storms and hurricanes using wind radii from the Extended Best Track dataset. The analysis methods used result in a more natural asymmetric buffer around the cyclone, which is also dependent upon storm strength. Climatological maps of the inland penetration of tropical cyclone winds based on tropical storms strength and Saffir-Simpson categories will be shown and discussed.