Predicting hurricane regional landfall rates: comparing local and basin-wide track model approaches

Abstract

We compare two methods for making predictions of the climatological distribution of the number of hurricanes making landfall along short sections of the North American coastline. The first method uses local data, and the second method uses a basin-wide track model. Using cross-validation we show that the basin-wide track model gives better predictions for almost all parts of the coastline. This is the first time such a comparison has been made, and is the first rigourous justification for the use of basin-wide track models for predicting hurricane landfall rates and hurricane risk.