A better method for predicting the number of hurricanes in an upcoming season has been developed by a team of University of Arizona atmospheric scientists. The UA team's new model improves the accuracy of seasonal hurricane forecasts for the North Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico by 23 percent. The team's research paper was published online in the journal Weather and Forecasting on March 25.

"Our model is better at predicting the number of seasonal hurricanes in the Atlantic than the other existing models," said first author Kyle Davis, a master's student in the UA atmospheric sciences department. "On average, our model has 23 percent less error for predicting hurricanes occurring since 2001."

Hurricanes are storms with maximum wind speeds in excess of 73 mph and are among the most damaging natural disasters in the U.S. The Atlantic hurricane season lasts from June 1 to Nov. 30.

The UA model can provide its forecast by the start of hurricane season, which allows people to prepare better for the upcoming season, Davis said. "Tens of millions of people are threatened by Atlantic hurricanes. It affects their properties, it affects their lives."

The team developed the new model by using data from the 1950 to 2013 hurricane seasons. They tested the new model by seeing if it could "hindcast" the number of hurricanes that occurred each season from 1900 to 1949.

"It performed really well in the period from 1949 to 1900," Davis said. "That's the most convincing test of our model."

Other investigators have estimated that damages from U.S. hurricanes from 1970 to 2002 cost $57 billion in 2015 dollars -- more than earthquakes and human-caused disasters combined for the time period.

Better seasonal predictions can help cities and governments in emergency management planning, said co-author Xubin Zeng, who holds the Agnese N. Haury Chair in Environment and is a UA professor of atmospheric sciences.

The paper, "A new statistical model to predict seasonal North Atlantic hurricane activity," by Davis, Zeng and Elizabeth A. Ritchie, a UA atmospheric sciences professor, is scheduled for print publication in a future issue of the journal of Weather and Forecasting. Science Foundation Arizona, the National Science Foundation and NASA funded the research.