Frequency of Winter Weather Regimes in the US Northeast as an Indicator for National Climate Assessment

Abstract:

k-means clustering has been performed in many places across the globe, but has never been solely performed on the northeast US. This study endeavors to perform the k-means analysis on the northeast US using winter time 850 mb wind data while overlaying precipitation and skin temperature for each of the days in each weather type. Also, storm tracks, teleconnections, energy data and extreme snow storm data have been analyzed to give a better idea of the patterns output from the k-means data. This data then allows the researcher to introduce an index of storminess in the northeast based on the weather types where the most precipitation and highest storm track density occur.