A KNOWLEDGE DISCOVERY STRATEGY FOR RELATING SEA SURFACE TEMPERATURES TO FREQUENCIES OF TROPICAL STORMS AND GENERATING PREDICTIONS OF HURRICANES UNDER 21ST-CENTURY GLOBAL WARMING SCENARIOS

The connections among greenhouse-gas emissions scenarios, global warming, and frequencies of hurricanes or tropical cyclones are among the least understood in climate science but among the most fiercely debated in the context of adaptation decisions or mitigation policies.

Here we show that a knowledge discovery strategy, which leverages observations and climate model simulations, offers the promise of developing credible projections of tropical cyclones based on sea surface temperatures (SST) in a warming environment. While this study motivates the development of new methodologies in statistics and data mining, the ability to solve challenging climate science problems with innovative combinations of traditional and state-of-the-art methods is demonstrated.