Theses and Dissertations

Issuing Body

Mississippi State University

Advisor

Mercer, Andrew E.

Committee Member

Dyer, Jamie

Committee Member

Brown, Michael E.

Date of Degree

8-12-2016

Document Type

Graduate Thesis - Open Access

Major

Professional Meteorology/Climatology

Degree Name

Master of Science

College

College of Arts and Sciences

Department

Department of Geosciences

Abstract

Severe weather outbreaks are fairly common events that occur multiple times a year. Many studies have attempted to define and quantify these outbreaks, however, no work has been done to directly relate synoptic-scale processes to outbreak intensity using the N15 ranking index. It is believed that a statistically significantly strong relationship between outbreak severity and quantified synoptic-scale parameters exists and can be utilized to predict the severity of an upcoming outbreak using the N15 ranking index. Utilizing the NCEP-NCAR Reanalysis dataset, synoptic-scale variables were chosen and standardized into domains created from areal coverages. A series of tests were completed, including stepwise regression, principal component analysis, and a bootstrap cross-validation method to find the most significant variables and best domain size. The findings from this study suggest that synoptic-scale processes do not have a strong relationship to severe weather outbreak intensity and that future work would be necessary.

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11668/18382

Comments

N15 Ranking Index||Severity||Outbreaks||Synoptic-Scale||Severe Weather

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