Abstract:

Hurricanes pose great threats to society, and they may be getting stronger and exposing new areas to risk due to climate change. Prior to satellite observation in the 1980s, catalogs of hurricanes were based on ships’ logs, and thus, some events are missing. This incomplete record of activity limits the accuracy of hurricane behavior predictions. Therefore, novel sources of long-running quantitative observations over the last century that capture hurricane information are needed. A surprising candidate is ground motion. When ocean waves from hurricanes crash on the shore, they cause ground shaking known as “microseism” that is recorded by seismometers on land. Because seismic recording has been ongoing since the late 19th century, there is a unique opportunity to identify missing hurricanes through analysis of microseism.
While large archives of historical seismic data exist around the world, the conversion of these data on large sheets of paper recorded by century-old instruments into resources compatible with modern data processing and scientific computing is not straightforward. Methods which extract usable information from these records and that allow microseism to be related to oceanic, atmospheric, and storm information are developed and applied to both modern and historical data from Harvard, MA. This work furthers the case for use of historical seismic data to obtain further information on long-running climate-sensitive processes.

Snacks served.