Predicting basin and landfalling hurricane numbers from sea surface temperature

Abstract

We are building a hurricane number prediction scheme based on first predicting main development region sea surface temperature (SST), then predicting the number of hurricanes in the Atlantic basin given the SST prediction, and finally predicting the number of US landfalling hurricanes based on the prediction of the number of basin hurricanes. We have described a number of SST prediction methods in previous work. We now investigate the empirical relationship between SST and basin hurricane numbers, and put this together with the SST predictions to make predictions of both basin and landfalling hurricane numbers.