Monday, 15 January 2001: 11:15 AM
This presentation reports on the second year's work of a three year
project to re-analyze the North Atlantic hurricane database (or HURDAT).
The original database of six-hourly positions and intensities were put
together in the 1960s in support of the Apollo space program to help
provide statistical track forecast guidance. In the intervening years,
this database - which is now freely and easily accessible on the Internet
from the National Hurricane Center's (NHC's) Webpage - has been utilized
for a wide variety of uses: climatic change studies, seasonal forecasting,
risk assessment for county emergency managers, analysis of potential
losses for insurance and business interests, intensity forecasting
techniques and verification of official and various model predictions
of track and intensity. Unfortunately, HURDAT was not designed with all of
these uses in mind when it was first put together and not all of them
may be appropriate given its original motivation.
One problem with HURDAT is that there are numerous systematic as sell as
some random errors in the database which need correction. Additionally,
analysis techniques have changed over the years at NHC as our understanding of
tropical cyclones has developed, leading to biases in the historical database
that have not been addressed. Another difficulty in applying the hurricane
database to studies concerned with landfalling events is the lack exact
location, time and intensity at hurricane landfall. Finally, recent efforts
into uncovering undocumented historical hurricanes in the late 1800s and early
1900s led by Jose Fernandez-Partagas have greatly increased our knowledge of
these past events, which are not yet incorporated into the HURDAT database.
Because of all of these issues, a re-analysis of the Atlantic
hurricane database is being attempted that will be completed in three
years. As part of the re-analyses, three files will be made available:
* The revised Atlantic HURDAT (with six hourly intensities & positions)
** HURDAT meta-file: A text file with detailed information about each suggested change proposed in the revised HURDAT.
*** A "center fix" file: This file is composed of actual observations of tropical cyclone positions and intensity estimates from the following platforms: aircraft, satellite, radar, and synoptic.
All changes made to HURDAT will be approved by a NHC Committee as this database is one that is officially maintained by them.
At the conference, results will be shown including a revised climatology of U.S. hurricane strikes back to 1851.
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