Internships

Jaeda Woodruff ’25

Major

Geosciences

Project Title

Real-time Forecasting System for Hurricane Hazards and Risk

I compared the performance of various hurricane forecasting models from 2020-2022 and created a customizable forecasting tool trained on publicly available data. The tool uses a super ensemble approach, combining multiple independent models in a performance-based weighted average. This tool will be used to enable real-time, highly accurate hazard forecasting of factors such as wind speed, storm surge, rainfall and storm path on a county-by-county basis without reliance on subjective forecasts. Through this research experience, I learned a range of skills including data analysis in the program Python and how to use simple machine-learning models to minimize error with multiple linear regression. I also gained insights into the strengths and weaknesses of our current forecasting abilities and the unusually active 2020 and 2023 hurricane seasons. I plan to extend my work with extreme weather over the next semester by researching the historical relationship between greenhouse gases and extreme weather formation.