Poisson Regression Model of the Annual Frequency of Tropical Cyclone Genesis in the Western North Pacific

T.P. Leahy¹

Section:Research Paper, Product Type: Journal-Paper
Vol.7 , Issue.1 , pp.26-32, Feb-2020

Online published on Feb 28, 2020

Copyright © T.P. Leahy . This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
 

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Abstract :
This study investigated the annual frequency of tropical cyclone genesis in the western North Pacific (WNP). Joint Typhoon Warning Centre data between 1991-2010 identified 332 tropical cyclones as defined by the Saffir-Simpson hurricane wind scale. The primary interest in this study was to understand the large-scale environmental atmospheric and oceanic factors that influence the annual frequency through a composite analysis. This study found an anomalous sea surface temperature (SST) pattern that reflects an El Niño Modoki-like phase generated a central-western North Pacific SST gradient amplifying anomalous westerly low-level zonal winds. These anomalous low-level westerly zonal winds contribute to tropical circulation generating anomalous anticyclonic vorticity suppressing the probability of genesis occurring. As a result of this insight, a simple Poisson generalised linear model was developed with a single covariate to model the annual frequency of tropical cyclone genesis. The single covariate is the mean of the zonal winds in the south-eastern corner of the WNP. This model produced an in-sample correlation with the observed annual frequency of 0.73 and an out-of-sample correlation of 0.67.

Key-Words / Index Term :
tropical cyclone, Poisson, genesis, Modoki

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