Clara Conatser ’25

Major

Geosciences

Project Title

Real-time Forecasting System for Hurricane Hazards and Risk

Certificate(s): French Language and Culture, Music Performance

I studied and compared different methods of forecasting tropical cyclones. These methods included simple consensus, which compares several models that are weighted equally; and corrected consensus, in which models are weighted according to how accurately they predict storms in a training set. My analysis used a previously published equation to identify the best predictors of storm track (i.e., geographic location) and intensity. I also compared the absolute and relative error for the different models. Overall, I found that velocity, minimum pressure, latitude and longitude created the most accurate model. Through this project, I’ve become familiar with many ensemble forecasting methods and gained experience coding in the program Python. This knowledge will be invaluable for my junior project, which will focus on some aspect of tropical cyclone climatology.



Internship Year

2023

Project Category

Oceans and Atmosphere

Organization(s)

Hurricane Hazards and Risk Analysis Group, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Princeton University - Princeton, New Jersey

Mentor(s)

Ning Lin, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering; Christine Blackshaw, Ph.D. candidate, Civil and Environmental Engineering; Avantika Gori, Ph.D. candidate, Civil and Environmental Engineering