The thesis work was in two major parts: development and testing of a new approach to detecting andtracking tropical cyclones in climate models; and application of an extreme value statistical approach toenable assessment of changes in weather extremes from climate models. The tracking algorithm applied a creative phase-space approach to differentiate between modeled tropicalcyclones and their mid-latitude cousins. A feature here was the careful attention to sensitivity to choice ofselection parameters, which is considerable. The major finding was that the changes over time wererelatively insensitive to these details. This new approach will improve and add confidence to futureassessments of climate impacts on hurricanes. The extremes approach utilized the Generalized Pareto Distribution (one of the standard approaches tostatistics of extremes) applied to present and future hurricane distributions as modeled by a regionalclimate model, then applied the changes to current observations to extract the changes in the extremes. Since climate models cannot resolve these extremes directly, this provides an excellent method ofdetermining weather extremes in general. This is of considerable societal importance as we are mostvulnerable to such extremes and knowledge of their changes enables improved planning and adaptationstrategies. | Uncertainties and Limitations in Simulating Tropical Cyclones by Asuka Suzuki-parker, Hardcover | Indigo Chapters