Environmental Internship Program - 2023 Booklet

OCEANS AND
ATMOSPHERE
Jaeda Woodruff ’25
GEOSCIENCES
PROJECT TITLE
Real-time Forecasting
System for Hurricane
Hazards and Risk
ORGANIZATION(S)
Hurricane Hazards and
Risk Analysis Group,
Department of Civil
and Environmental
Engineering, Princeton
University
MENTOR(S)
Ning Lin,
Professor of Civil and
Environmental
Engineering; Christine
Blackshaw, Ph.D.
candidate, Civil and
Environmental
Engineering; Avantika
Gori, Ph.D. candidate,
Civil and Environmental
Engineering
I compared the performance of various
hurricane forecasting models from 2020-2022
and created a customizable forecasting tool
trained on publicly available data. The tool
uses a super ensemble approach, combining
multiple independent models in a performancebased
weighted average. This tool will be used
to enable real-time, highly accurate hazard
forecasting of factors such as wind speed, storm
surge, rainfall and storm path on a county-bycounty
basis without reliance on subjective
forecasts. Through this research experience, I
learned a range of skills including data analysis
in the program Python and how to use simple
machine-learning models to minimize error
with multiple linear regression. I also gained
insights into the strengths and weaknesses of our
current forecasting abilities and the unusually
active 2020 and 2023 hurricane seasons. I plan
to extend my work with extreme weather over
the next semester by researching the historical
relationship between greenhouse gases and
extreme weather formation.
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