10/18/17 Update

Blog Post 2 - Update

This past week I have been trying to locate my data sources, I was easily able to find my hurricane data off of NOAA's website. However it has been difficult to find average sea surface temperature data by year. However I did find data for average temperature by month. 

This next week I plan to narrow down what months are considered hurricane season. By doing this I will be able to use the month by month data for temperature, and not have an enormous number of maps to make. 

Since I am having trouble finding the yearly average, I think I will have to use the month average data. A question I have is, since I will be doing multiple months of multiple years, how do I narrow it down to specific years without skewing my data? Can I randomly pick years to look at or is there another way to do this? I don't want to have to create hundreds of maps to show every single year. 

Project Proposal

Hurricane Activity and Sea Surface Temps

Introduction:

Over the past fifty years we have seen a dramatic rise in sea surface temperatures. With the rise in temperatures, comes the inevitable warming of the ice caps in the north, this causes sea levels to rise. A major problem with sea level rise is that a coastal community becomes more vulnerable to flooding. In the past fifty years it appears that the number of high category hurricanes in the US have increased. These storms have devastating affects on coastal communities, including storm surge flooding. Specifically, we have seen an increase in devastating high category hurricanes in the southeast region of the United States.

Objectives:

• Map sea surface temperatures and category 3&4 hurricane activity in the Southeastern portion of the United States - including approx. 50 years ago compared to 25 years ago and current 2017 data.
• Assess if there is a relationship between increased surface temperatures and number of Cat 3&4 hurricanes in that region. 

Methodology:

For this project, I plan to use downloadable GIS shapefiles to create maps in ArcGIS.

Deliverable's:

Multiple maps will be created from this research project in order to show the progression over the past 50 years of hurricane activity and sea surface temperature. This data will provide information on whether there is an increase in higher category hurricanes with the increase in sea surface temperatures.

Work Plan:

Week of Oct. 9th: Finish Project Proposal
Week of Oct. 16th: Continue to download data that will be beneficial to this research. Blog Post 2.
Week of Oct. 23rd: Create maps of a few years that have good data (Years TBD).
Week of Oct. 30th: Continue creation of maps. Process of elimination. Blog Post 3.
Week of Nov. 6th: Start to edit maps design (layout, colors, etc.) Blog Post 4.
Week of Nov. 13th: Begin analysis on correlation. Works-in-Progress Presentation.
Week of Nov. 20th: Thanksgiving Break - begin to think about final Poster
Week of Nov. 27th: Finish up analysis. Stark to design Poster. Blog Post 5.
Week of Dec. 4th: Finalize poster. Blog 6.
Week of Dec. 11th: Hand in final poster. Blog Post 7.

Data Sources:

Current Sources in use:

Knapp, K. R., M. C. Kruk, D. H. Levinson, H. J. Diamond, and C. J. Neumann, 2010:
The International Best Track Archive for Climate Stewardship (IBTrACS): Unifying tropical cyclone best track data.
Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 91, 363-376.
 doi:10.1175/2009BAMS2755.1 

https://www.wunderground.com/education/webster.asp

NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI)