AGS-PRF: Improving Tropical Cyclone Risk Assessment by Incorporating Storm Size Physics

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This postdoctoral fellowship award provides funding to enhance current tropical cyclone (TC) risk assessment methodology by incorporating physics-based TC size information into existing risk modeling frameworks. There is a lack of fundamental understanding of TC size and that leads to an inability to fully quantify the risk of damage from landfalling TCs. The overarching goal of the project will be to demonstrate a skillful physics-based explanation of the observed distribution of TC size, as well as of the size of an individual storm at genesis and during its lifecycle, for integration into a TC risk assessment framework. The project will make use of a combination of observations, high-resolution weather forecast model output, idealized modeling studies, and theory to elucidate the physics underlying the observed distribution of TC size. The results will then be used to develop and incorporate storm size physics into comprehensive TC risk assessments. Progress towards these objectives will be assessed by statistical verification of the skill of the size predictors in observations and weather forecast models. The broader societal impacts of the project will be through better assessment and potentially mitigation of damage risk in both the short (e.g. emergency management) and long-term (e.g. infrastructure planning). The project will also enhance collaborative efforts between scientists and risk managers and support an early-career scientist.