Optimisation-based refinement of genesis indices for tropical cyclones

Abstract

Abstract Tropical cyclone genesis indices are valuable tools for studying the relationship between large-scale environmental fields and the genesis of tropical cyclones, supporting the identification of future trends of cyclone genesis. However, their formulation is generally derived from simple statistical models (e.g., multiple linear regression) and are not optimised globally. In this paper, we present a simple framework for optimising genesis indexes given a user-specified trade-off between two performance metrics, which measure how well an index captures the spatial and interannual variability of tropical cyclone genesis. We apply the proposed framework to the popular Emanuel and Nolan Genesis Potential Index, yielding new, optimised formulas that correspond to different trade-offs between spatial and interannual variability. Result show that our refined indexes can improve the performance of the Emanuel and Nolan index up to 8% for spatial variability and 16%–22% for interannual variability; this improvement was found to be statistically significant (p < 0.01). Lastly, by analysing the formulas found, we give some insights into the role of the different inputs of the index in maximising one metric or the other.