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While the official Atlantic hurricane season begins on June 1st and ends on November 30th1, does every day have an equal chance of a severe hurricane? If not, on which days are they most active? These are questions we address in our new forecast to predict when severe storms are likely to occur using data science techniques. We take a representative sample of all storms in a database, where each data point represents the time when a storm had wind speeds exceeding a specific threshold according to the Saffir-Simpson scale. In this process, we discover explainable artificial intelligence utilizing statistical analysis.
The above button navigates to a Python Notebook where we can fully replicate the forecast.
To begin, do severe hurricanes occur uniformly over all days during Atlantic hurricane season? To answer this question, we utilize the Hurricane Database2 (HURDAT2) from the National Hurricane Center (NHC). The rows represent a record for a storm and relevant columns or fields include the timestamp of the record and wind intensity. Based on the timestamp, we derive the calendar day number which is the total count of days since the beginning of the year. For example, the calendar day number for July 31st is 212. We can test to see if this sample is uniform, or whether the calendar day number for all severe storm records in the database have a uniform probability. After developing and executing a Kolmogorov-Smirnov test with 95% confidence threshold, we can reject the null hypothesis and assume that the distribution is not uniform3.
Based on the assumption that the likelihood of a severe hurricane is not uniform across all days in the hurricane season, we explore the most active period of severe hurricanes. The diagram titled Fluids 2025 Atlantic Hurricane Season Forecast contains a frequency histogram of the data sampled from HURDAT2. We calculate a 95% confidence interval of severe storms with this distribution of calendar day numbers where the beginning of the interval represents July 31st and ends on October 27th.
