The analysis of tropical cyclone tracks in the Western North pacific through data mining. Part II: Tropical cyclone landfall

Abstract

This is the second paper of a two-part series of papers on the analysis of tropical cyclone (TC) tracks in the western North Pacific Ocean. In this paper, TC landfalls in the South China Sea and western North Pacific basins are investigated through the data-mining approach. On the basis of historical TC archives, the C4.5 algorithm, a classic tree algorithm for classification, has been employed to quantitatively discover rules governing TC landfall. Aclassification tree, with 14 leaf nodes, has been built. The path from the root node to each leaf node forms a rule. Fourteen rules governing TC landfall across the Chinese coast have been unraveled with respect to the selected attributes having potential influence on TC landfall. The rules are derived by the attributes and splitting values. From the classification tree, split values, such as 27°N latitude, 130°E longitude, 141°E in the west extension index, and 0.289 in the monsoon index have been shown to be useful for TC forecasting. The rules have been justified from the perspective of meteorology and knowledge of TC movement and recurvature (e.g., deep-layer mean winds and large-scale circulation). The research findings are also consistent with existing results concerning TC movement and landfall. Both the unraveled rules and the associated splitting values can provide useful references for the prediction of TC landfall over China. © 2013 American Meteorological Society.