Analysis of Cyclone Tracks of North Indian Ocean Using Cluster Analysis - Monitoring and Prediction of Tropical Cyclones in the Indian Ocean and Climate Change - page 87

Analysis of Cyclone Tracks of North
Indian Ocean Using Cluster Analysis
Mukta Paliwal* and Anand Patwardhan
SJM School of Management, IIT Bombay, Mumbai
*e-mail: [e-mail]
1. Introduction
Tropical cyclones form over most ocean basins. Based on data from 1981-
2010, the Western North Pacific accounts for the largest number of Tropical
Cyclones (Typhoons), averaging 26 per year, followed by the Eastern North
Pacific (17), Atlantic (10), South Indian Ocean (9), and the North Indian Ocean
(5) (Landsea and Delgado, 2011).
The probability of landfall of a tropical cyclone depends on its trajectory.
Behaviour of tropical cyclone trajectories needs to be better understood in
order to identify potentially predictable aspects of landfall. Analysis of the
spatio-temporal characteristics of these trajectories may be useful for identifying
features relevant for monitoring and prediction. While such analyses have been
carried out extensively in other ocean basins (Blender et al., 1997; Elsner and
Liu, 2003; Elsner, 2003; Gaffney, 2007; Camargo et al., 2007; Nakamura et
al., 2009), there is lack of such studies in the North Indian Ocean. At the same
time, countries in this basin experience high level of socio-economic impacts
due to tropical cyclones. The present study attempts to address this research
gap by applying cluster analysis methods to characterize cyclone tracks in the
North Indian Ocean. Various attributes of tropical cyclones over this basin
such as genesis location, landfall etc. are then studied for each of the identified
clusters. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. In the next section,
pertinent literature is discussed. Section 3 presents details of the data used in
this study. Brief discussion of the methodology being adopted is presented in
Section 4. Results are discussed in Section 5 followed by a section on conclusion.
2. Pertinent Literature
For the North Indian Ocean, work to date has focussed on prediction of cyclone
tracks and frequency analysis of occurrence of cyclones (Mohanty, 1994; Singh