An Examination of Spatial Correlation in Hurricane Wind Fields

• Activity Number: 505
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Wednesday, August 1, 2012 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Physical and Engineering Sciences
• Author(s): Shurong Fang*+ and Yue Li and Weichiang Pang and Fangqian Liu
• Companies: Michigan Technological University and CEE/Michigan Tech University and Clemson University and Clemson University
• Keywords: Spatial Correlation ; Semivariogram ; Hurricane Wind Fields ; Software R

Abstract

Each year hurricanes cause extensive economic loss and social disruption all around the world. Annual hurricane economic loss in the United States has been $10 billion in recent years. Various hurricane wind field models have been proposed, and hurricane loss has been estimated based on these models. However, spatially correlated wind fields have not been considered yet. This paper examines spatial correlation in hurricane wind fields. In this paper, we describe the spatial correlation structure of hurricane wind fields and introduce the calculation of the spatial correlation using software R. The spatial correlation of wind fields is obtained by computing the semivariance of the standardized wind speed residuals between observed data from Real-time Hurricane Wind Analysis System (H*wind) and wind field model data. We consider the Exponential and Gaussian semivariogram models to fit the empirical semivariogram. As an illustrative example, the data from Hurricane Ivan (2004) is used to quantify the spatial correlations in wind field. Our analysis qualitatively determines the spatial correlation in the hurricane wind fields.