A 10,000-Year Global Stochastic Tropical Cyclone Catalog with Wind-Dependent Track Transitions (WHITS)

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Nakamura, Jennifer, Lall, Upmanu
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Nakamura, Jennifer
Lall, Upmanu
author_facet Nakamura, Jennifer
Lall, Upmanu
contents Reliable assessment of tropical cyclone (TC) risk is limited by the brevity and spatial sparsity of the historical record, particularly for the rare, high-intensity landfalls that dominate insured loss. We present WHITS (Wind-focused Hurricane Interactive Track Simulator), a non-parametric semi-Markov track generator that extends the HITS framework of Nakamura et al. (2015) in three ways: transitions between historical track segments are conditioned on local wind speed in addition to position, age, and forward vector; the kernel selection on the comparative-vector term is sharpened to suppress dynamically inconsistent jumps; and a short smoothing window is applied across each transition to remove the position and wind discontinuities reported by downstream surge users. WHITS is fit to the full available best-track record in each of six basins in IBTrACS, extending in the North Atlantic to 1851 and in other basins to the earliest year of reliable best-track data. The resulting 10,000-yr global synthetic catalog reproduces observed track density and the annual hurricane/typhoon-force wind-hit probability across all basins. The catalog is intended for catastrophe-risk applications where a large, low-bias sample of physically plausible tracks is more useful than a small, statistically corrected one.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_20494
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A 10,000-Year Global Stochastic Tropical Cyclone Catalog with Wind-Dependent Track Transitions (WHITS)
Nakamura, Jennifer
Lall, Upmanu
Machine Learning
Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics
Applications
Reliable assessment of tropical cyclone (TC) risk is limited by the brevity and spatial sparsity of the historical record, particularly for the rare, high-intensity landfalls that dominate insured loss. We present WHITS (Wind-focused Hurricane Interactive Track Simulator), a non-parametric semi-Markov track generator that extends the HITS framework of Nakamura et al. (2015) in three ways: transitions between historical track segments are conditioned on local wind speed in addition to position, age, and forward vector; the kernel selection on the comparative-vector term is sharpened to suppress dynamically inconsistent jumps; and a short smoothing window is applied across each transition to remove the position and wind discontinuities reported by downstream surge users. WHITS is fit to the full available best-track record in each of six basins in IBTrACS, extending in the North Atlantic to 1851 and in other basins to the earliest year of reliable best-track data. The resulting 10,000-yr global synthetic catalog reproduces observed track density and the annual hurricane/typhoon-force wind-hit probability across all basins. The catalog is intended for catastrophe-risk applications where a large, low-bias sample of physically plausible tracks is more useful than a small, statistically corrected one.
title A 10,000-Year Global Stochastic Tropical Cyclone Catalog with Wind-Dependent Track Transitions (WHITS)
topic Machine Learning
Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics
Applications
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.20494