The Storm of the Century!

Abstract

Can we use data to estimate the probability of an event more extreme than we have observed before? When it made landfall at Grand Isle Louisiana, Hurricane Katrina brought storm tides exceeding 14 feet. The maximum hourly storm tide ever observed at this location, before Katrina, was just over 13 feet – so how could Katrina’s storm tide have been anticipated? Why was Katrina dubbed “The Storm of the Century”? We aim to answer both of these questions.

The lecture can be adapted to suit students in Years 7-13. We demonstrate the flaws of simple approaches for estimating the probability of extreme storm tides, including relative frequencies obtained from historical data and (where appropriate) extrapolation assuming Normality. Students then take part in a hands-on activity to investigate the fit of an extreme value model to annual maximum storm tides at Grand Isle. A Shiny application has been developed to allow students to interact with the methods, and there is a strong emphasis on communication of results to non-statisticians.

Example materials

A recent version of the activity, given to school children attending a Royal Institute event held at Teesside University in March 2016, can be found here.

Software tools

In December 2015 I was awarded a University Learning, Teaching and Student Experience innovation grant to develop web-based applications to enable research-informed teaching and outreach activities. A protoptype of the Shiny software application we have developed to assist this outreach talk can be found here .

References

Fawcett, L. and Newman, K. (2016). The storm of the century! Promoting student enthusiasm for practical statistics. Submitted to Teaching Statistics.