Join us for this week’s Physical Oceanography Seminar featuring Dr. Kun Gao (GFDL at Princeton University), with his presentation titled, “Predicting hurricane activity on the sub-seasonal timescale.”

Abstract: Existing hurricane prediction systems can be classified into two categories: 1) these for hurricane track and intensity predictions on the week timescale, and 2) these for the predictions of hurricane activity over the entire season. Substantial progress has been made in improving the predictions on the two distinct timescales in the past decade. However, the prediction of hurricane activity on the intermediate timescale, the sub-seasonal scale (from two weeks to two months), is at most tentative. In this talk I will present recent effort on the sub-seasonal prediction of North Atlantic hurricane activity at GFDL with the use of global-to-regional refinement method. It will be shown that the two-way nesting method provides an efficient way for realistic representation of hurricane structure in global models and substantially improves the prediction of major hurricane activity on the sub-seasonal timescale.