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Circular Conditional Autoregressive Modeling of Vector Fields
Journal article   Peer reviewed

Circular Conditional Autoregressive Modeling of Vector Fields

Danny Modlin, Montserrat Fuentes and Brian Reich
Environmetrics, Vol.23(1), pp.46-53
02/2012
DOI: 10.1002/env.1133
PMCID: PMC3864821
PMID: 24353452
url
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/3864821View
Open Access

Abstract

As hurricanes approach landfall, there are several hazards for which coastal populations must be prepared. Damaging winds, torrential rains, and tornadoes play havoc with both the coast and inland areas; but, the biggest seaside menace to life and property is the storm surge. Wind fields are used as the primary forcing for the numerical forecasts of the coastal ocean response to hurricane force winds, such as the height of the storm surge and the degree of coastal flooding. Unfortunately, developments in deterministic modeling of these forcings have been hindered by computational expenses. In this paper, we present a multivariate spatial model for vector fields, that we apply to hurricane winds. We parameterize the wind vector at each site in polar coordinates and specify a circular conditional autoregressive (CCAR) model for the vector direction, and a spatial CAR model for speed. We apply our framework for vector fields to hurricane surface wind fields for Hurricane Floyd of 1999 and compare our CCAR model to prior methods that decompose wind speed and direction into its N-S and W-E cardinal components.
spatial statistics hurricane winds circular statistics cross-covariance CCAR model

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