STATISTICAL modeling of tropical cyclones' longevity after landfall in Australia

Most of the devastations wrecked by a tropical cyclone occur on land, and therefore, its longevity after landfall is of critical importance. Published literature identifies many factors including inland environmental characteristics that influence this longevity and power dissipation rate. These have been studied in this research in the context of tropical cyclones that hit Australian coasts during the period 1970-2003. For obvious reasons, tropical cyclones which manifested recurrence or multiple landfalls have been excluded. After performing correlation, regression, eigen analysis, and significance tests it has been found that from variables identified in literature storm intensity at landfall, translation speed, relative humidity, surface temperature, upper level divergence, and surface roughness are the significant parameters. However, stepwise regression retained only surface roughness, central pressure and longitudinal position, which yielded a coefficient of determination of 88 percent for the data. The concept of surface roughness is well understood, but hitherto, no consistent metric for the purpose of tropical cyclones' propagation existed, and therefore, this paper introduces a scheme of assigning surface roughness based on terrain characteristics.