Two Important Features of the 156 Deadliest Tropical Cyclones (1851-1996) in the North Atlantic

Abstract

Damages and deaths due to a tropical cyclone (TC) can easily occur at three places belong to a TC: the small ring area (SRA) of maximum sustaining wind around TC eye, the large ring area (LRA) of the rotating wind field around SRA and the skin air belt (SKAB) around LRA. However, weather forecasters only use the intensity of the SRA of a TC as the proxy to gauge the whole TC intensity, which led to many “non-major” TCs proved to be “deadly” TCs. This is called as “over-generalization problem” (OGP). Here we introduce a new way to measure the intensity of a TC. After investigating 156 deadly TCs in North Atlantic, we found an important feature: 83.3% of the top 156 deadliest TCs usually made landfalls along “five major tracks”. Furthermore, we found that the new intensity of those “deadliest” TCs kept almost unchanged with the increasing of time intervals at earlier stage from the genesis points, whereas the new intensity of those “safe” TCs increased in a line with much steeper slope. Using these two features, weather forecasters can have two more options to identify those “non-major” and “deadly” TCs by SSHS in future.