Kade Barkas, “Toward Quantifying the Overlap Between Severe-Weather and Hurricane Seasons in the Southeast United States”
Mentor: Clark Evans, Atmospheric Sciences
Poster #26
The height of severe weather season in the Southern United States increasingly appears to overlap with the preparation period for hurricane season. The increasing overlap between the season potentially hinders peoples’ ability to adequately prepare for hurricanes, severe weather, and their related hazards. To begin to discover the potential socio-economic impacts of the increasingly overlapping seasons, this study utilizes observed severe-weather occurrences to define the severe-weather season and its long-term trends on a county-by-county basis across the United States. Using severe convective watch data from the Storm Prediction Center (SPC) sourced through the Iowa Environmental Mesonet, severe-weather seasons are diagnosed based on watch frequency and type to determine the peak of each season in each county in the United States. The presentation will include initial diagnoses of severe-weather seasons over a 27-year period broken down by watch type (e.g., severe vs. tornado) and El Nino. Future work will entail sourcing hurricane data from the National Hurricane Center (NHC) to define hurricane season for each county in the Southeastern United States to quantify the extent to which the hurricane season and severe weather seasons overlap and how that has changed over time.