Corene Matyas, Ph.D., Professor, Geography Department, UF

Join us for the livestream February 4th, 11:45am ET: https://youtube.com/live/S80tfkE8cUY?feature=share

(Please visit our YouTube channel main page for the stream if there are any issues with the direct link.)

ABSTRACT

Understanding the spatial patterns of moisture surrounding hurricanes is important to forecasting storm structure and rainfall production. This talk will highlight two different methods our research group used to assess to examine total column water vapor (TCWV) patterns around North Atlantic hurricanes during 2000-2021. One approach uses a convolutional autoencoder (CAE) with k-means cluster analysis to process over 4600 images. The second uses a principal components analysis on a smaller sample of cases to avoid autocorrelation and with high-shear cases removed. Both approaches identified four distinct spatial distributions of TCWV in terms of amount, symmetry, and areal extent, and three of the four patterns are very closely-matched between the two methods, suggesting these patterns are robust. Hurricane intensity, size, and precipitation features vary among the four clusters, characteristics which are closely associated with the moisture and environmental conditions of each cluster.

BIO

Cori Matyas, Ph.D., is a UF Foundation Research Professor in the Department of Geography. They are a physical geographer who researches the spatial patterns of precipitation and tropical cyclones. They teach courses in climatology, hurricanes, atmospheric teleconnections, and spatial analysis of atmospheric data and have received CLAS Teacher of the Year awards in 2009 and 2019 and Excellence in Teaching Award in 2019 from the SouthEastern Division of the American Association of Geographers (AAG) in 2019. In 2025, they were elected a Fellow of the AAG. This research was funded by the National Science Foundation (AGS- 2012008).